We live in a truly global online community where e-commerce is only as good as your ability to communicate effectively. Unfortunately, despite residing in a global community, we don’t speak one universal language. English may arguably be the second language of choice for most non-native speakers, but it does not effectively communicate when you’re selling products. Selling to a non-native English speaker can be near impossible even if it’s drafted with the utmost simplicity. It is for this reason that website localization is so important. When you’re communicating with your target audience in a language, they understand inquiries will see a sharp rise.
Entrepreneur pointed out: “According to research firm IDC, web users are four times more likely to purchase from a company that communicates in their own language. Additionally, visitors to websites stay twice as long on sites that are available in their native tongue, according to Forrester Research.”
Getting an e-commerce website translated is not as simple as using Google’s translate service or any other machine translation system. Machine translation is too basic. A machine cannot make sense of idioms, imaginative use of words or sarcasm. Effective e-commerce translation starts with hiring a professional translator or a team that understands both English and the language you want the website translated to. But for the team to effectively translate your website it has to be prepared for the process. A couple of best practices need to be followed which makes the job of the translators easier and ends up saving you time in the long run.
Make sure all your content is in neatly arranged Word documents
The first step is to ensure that your e-commerce website’s content is in a Word document. The document should be titled with the page’s URL, Meta Title, and Description. Once you have all the content arranged you need to go through it and find phrases that are repeated throughout the website. For instance, ‘buy now,’ ‘40% off’, ‘buy today,’ etc. are all phrases which are re-used throughout a regular website and will continue to be used. But there is no need to get the phrases translated multiple times. Just keep one instance of the phrase and remove all the others. The primary benefit of doing this is a reduced word count, and you’ll not have to hire a translator each time you add a new product to your store.
Tip: Maintain an excel sheet with all the English versions of the most regularly used words and their foreign counterparts.
Always have a developer and web designer on standby to handle the space
Every language is different in the way it occupies space. Also, the layout will change as you change the language. Some languages flow from left to right like English others from right to left like Arabic. Even languages that use the same Latin characters as English like German will occupy a different amount of space. German words are longer and sentences on average can be twice as long as an English sentence. Some languages will fill comparatively less space, for instance, the word “Search” in French occupies ten characters while it Japanese it’s just two characters.
Your front end teams and designers should know how to handle this from the very beginning. A localized website will be very different from how it looks originally. For instance, translating your website to Chinese will mean that there are fewer characters but the characters occupy more space. Plus, some languages do not use contrast like we do in English case in point being Japanese which does not use italics. So, you need to find a way to get the point across effectively regarding design and layout for the website to be more effective.
Dealing with special characters
Almost all languages in the world have a set of special characters with accents and unique letters. It is estimated that there are 110,117 special characters amongst known languages. Your e-commerce website is going to run into problems if it’s not prepared to show special characters. Many times the special characters will end up looking like obscure symbols. But if you decide against using special characters in the translations it could change the meaning of what you’re trying to get across.
One way to solve the problem is to encode your localized website correctly. Generally speaking UTF-8 works in all cases. You’ll want to use UTF-16 if you’re localizing the website for Asia to reduce overall bandwidth and also because you’re not going to be using many Latin characters.
Market specific layout for your e-commerce website
Many e-commerce business owners overlook the fact that being market specific in the way of how their e-commerce website functions is critical. Even very subtle details like the difference in how the date-picker tool works can make a difference. For instance, in the US, the MM-DD-YYYY format is used while in Europe a DD-MM-YYYY format is preferred. Another example is that in Europe and UK, in particular, the week starts on Monday whereas in the US it starts on Sunday.
You also need to consider the tone of the language used. Some languages are more formal than others. It goes without saying that in some languages an informal tone is taken as an insult whereas we don’t think twice about it in English. So, make sure that the translated texts address the audience as Madam or Sir if its part of the culture i.e. France, Germany and Japan. It is important to ask the translators for their advice on making sure that your content is culturally appropriate.
Finally, if you have a large and significantly growing e-commerce store make sure that a native speaker manages your region-specific pages. Having one in-house can make maintaining the localized version a lot easier. It will also help you deal with inquiries via email or chat which may be in that native language. It goes without saying that people in Spain, who visit a localized version of your website in Spanish will email you in Spanish too!