The rise of globalization opens up more markets and opportunities. On the flipside, it establishes the pressing need to speak in your customers’ language to get their attention amidst the clutter of ads. Presenting a localized set of marketing collaterals to your prospects or customers has become almost mandatory in today’s marketplace.

It is important to ensure your marketing materials are designed with localization in mind during the conceptualizing stage, so that the same marketing brochure can be localized swiftly and effectively thereafter. Otherwise, more time and effort will be spent on re-creation of the design or localization process, making little economic sense.

Here are five quick tips you can utilize in the creation of marketing brochures intended for localization, without compromising on your corporate identity in the long run.

1. Space matters
Chinese and English are generally more compact in text length. Thus, the translation derived from these languages will often be longer than the source text. Translations may also end up longer because translators sometimes use more words to describe and bring out the nuances and meaning.

The rule of thumb is: Set aside 40% of extra space in your brochure design for the translated content which may take up more text space. You would not want your typesetter to take drastic measures like adding new pages, re-positioning the images, adjusting the line spacing or reducing the font sizes and diverting away from your corporate branding guidelines.

2. Avoid having narrow columns
The Thai language does not use punctuation and has no spaces between words. Breaks only occur between sentences. If you have narrow columns for languages like Thai, Tamil and Burmese, you risk cutting the sentence and conveying a different meaning should the line breaks be made inappropriately.

Languages like Hungarian, Finnish and German use single long words to represent a sequence of shorter words in other languages. For instance, the English phrase “user information for using the escalator” may be translated as “rolltreppenbenutzungshinweise” in German. Having several long words will pose a challenge for layouts with narrow columns. A text with numerous hyphens is also not aesthetically pleasing.

3. Do not capitalize on capitalization
In alphabets with a case distinction i.e. upper case and lower case letters are used, capitalization can be used in the design to emphasize a point. However, it would not work for languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Korean and Japanese which do not use the Roman alphabet. Similarly, the first letters of all German nouns are capitalized so capitalizing German words will not make much of an impact.

Italicizing is not recommended in Asian languages like Korean and Japanese as it may not look pleasing to the eye. Alternatively, you may want to consider BOLDING certain words or use a stronger font colour to highlight the important phrases and points.

4. Avoid country specific information
Different countries have different preferences and formats for presenting dates, addresses, numbers and other figures. For instance, decimal separators are used differently in different locales. Three million dollars is symbolized in different ways as illustrated in the table below.

As shown in the table below, Japanese and Thai are examples of two cultures where the dates are expressed in significantly different ways from the English format.

Japan employs the Heisei date system. The year 2000, which is the 12^th year of the current emperor’s reign is expressed as “Heisei 12”. Thais adopt the Buddhist calendar way of expressing the date, denoting the year 2000 as “2543”.

We may be familiar with using 8/9 to indicate a date. However, this may prove confusing. It could mean 8^th September or 9^th August, depending on different culture conventions.

That is why for the main body content, it is best to spell out entire words and avoid the use of abbreviations. A one-size fits all approach is hardly applicable in this respect.

5. Support from design applications and fonts
If you intend to utilize in-house resources for design and typesetting of the foreign languages, you have to ensure your design application supports the languages you require for localization. Old programs like Freehand might not support other languages well.

Some languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu read from right-to-left. If you are localizing into these languages, you have to make sure that the software you use can support these languages too.

It is also advisable to research on the font choices when creating the design template. Select fonts that support special characters as some fancy font families do not have this function. If you want to gauge the final design in a foreign language, you can test it out by pasting dummy text (with your selected font and font size) which can be easily obtained by going to websites in that language.

While these guidelines can get you started with localization, you might want to consider working alongside an experienced global content management and localization company instead of mitigating problems later on, which often proves to be costly.

A well-established global content management and localization partner can fully understand your content and localization needs, proactively identify potential issues and provide efficient, cost-effective solutions.

This globalization movement has thus set the stage for an increasing number of firms to expand and establish their presence internationally, however when businesses venture into foreign markets, they are usually faced with the tough challenge of adaptation as product names and marketing messages might become meaningless or even offensive after translation into a different language.

An example of what happens when global branding goes wrong would be the case of Pepsi. When Pepsi entered the Chinese markets, they discovered that their slogan “Come Alive with the Pepsi Generation” was literally translated in Chinese as “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead” and as “Come out of the grave with Pepsi”.

Examples of such blunders are endless, but it all boils down to the same point: there is a need for businesses to be communicating clear and precise messages that convey the true meaning of the original text.

Therefore before further expansion into their target markets, it is imperative for businesses to have effective brand localization strategies through the understanding of the target market’s language and culture, as it is illogical to market products and services through extravagant campaigns if consumers across the globe cannot understand the message being brought across.

Below are some fundamental practices that businesses should adhere to before going any further with their marketing strategies.

Anticipating and Highlighting potential pitfalls
By anticipating and highlighting potential pitfalls that are based on cultural difference, it allows businesses to carefully select messages to communicate what the brand stands for in the context of the target markets.

Conducting Cultural Analysis
A cross cultural analysis allows businesses to examine essential cultural elements such as values, norms and artefacts of the target markets.

Ensure that the product is properly localized for the target market
Last but not least; businesses should ensure that their products are properly localized to suit the target markets before officially releasing the products itself.

“To develop any content for today’s global multicultural audience requires accounting for linguistic and cultural difference from the very inception of the product to the very end of distribution”
- Tom Edward of Multilingual

With consumer demands becoming more diversified with a wider variety of choices, it is thus essential for businesses to implement effective brand localization strategies based on the different markets to cater to their target audiences; this would in turn enable businesses to acquire the competitive advantage in their target markets, ensuring that consumer experience is consistent across all languages and most importantly achieving global success for their brands and services.

With this move,YouTube and Google have signified the importance of web localization as they seek to provide a local experience for its increasing number of non-English speaking users from all over the world.

This latest additions include Croatian, Filipino, Serbian and Slovak, making it a grand total of 28 languages available on YouTube.

[Source:Wired.com]

1. Using a global template
To differentiate segments of your global audience, you could use a global template to help segregate your different target audiences and direct them to the respective site corresponding to their locale.

Examples of such usage is in the form of a splash page for visitors to select their location as shown below in the example of McDonald’s international site, and Manchester United’s main site, in which visitors can select their respective language through a dropdown box.

The use of global templates would help set the platform for your global operations as visitors can easily navigate and find the webpage in their native language. Newly localized sites can also be added easily to the global template.

2. Ensuring Cultural and Political Sensitivity
To avoid any form of backlash, it is of utmost importance for businesses to cultivate a sense of cultural and political sensitivity in terms of their website content.

It might be considered alright to use a banner that contains pictures of scantily clad ladies in more liberal nations such as the United States however it would be considered culturally insensitive to do so in regions such as the Middle East.

Failure to ensure cultural and political sensitivity in your web content will not only affect your business operations, and depending on the severity of the issues, businesses might even be forced to shut down their operations in that particular region, inevitably damaging their global reputation.

3.Creating a local experience
Although you might not have local offices set up in your target markets, it is still possible to ensure visitors to your site can have an experience that caters to their locale;

One such example will be the use of local phone numbers in the website. Calls can then be directed to the nearest regional offices. Another example would be the use of local currencies in your product catalog.

Other factors to look into are demonstrating an awareness of public holidays. Some successful global brands put up notices of well wishes and even change their website themes to commemorate special occasions. The following is an example of Google’s thematic change to commemorate Singapore’s National Day.

4.Using of icons
As you might not have translated your website to the native language of your target market; a practical approach to go about this language barrier would be the usage of universal icons instead of just words for your links. This will ensure that visitors who are not familiar with your language would still be able to navigate through the website even with differences in terms of language understanding.

5.Optimizing your website
Even as high speed internet access is somewhat prevalent in most developed countries, there are still many parts of the world that do not have such a luxury. Thus it is important that your website is properly optimized so as to ensure browsing consistency.

Some simple steps you can take are to ensure that your images are properly re-sized and other multimedia elements, especially those with huge file sizes, are used sparingly.

A good practice would also be to test the loading time of your website in various connection speeds as it might take a much longer time to load due to differences in bandwidth in other parts of the world.