Professionals of Website Localization Services and their Best Practises

[:en]It is the general line of a rule that hiring website localization services is the only path to obtain appropriate and culturally-acceptable results. In the meanwhile of hunting down the best service provider, it is intriguing to know about the strategies and practises followed by professionals. 

With hands-on-experience and trained language skills, a localization expert will prove websites that are clickable and SEO friendly. Hence, let’s get into the details of the best practises that website localization professionals perform for their customers and clients. By knowing them, it can validate your question on whether hiring and paying for a language expert will be worthy enough of your time and money or not. 

How Expert Linguists & Translators Handle Website Localization?

Let’s start from the basic definition of what website localization is all about. When the elements (verbal and graphical) are translated from one language to another, and then gets converted as per the target audience’s culture, then this is termed localization. The translation step leads and then followed by adapting the context of the page to specific target culture. Besides knowledge in the language and web development related aspects, there are many other practices that professionals usually cater to while handling a site localization project;

Maintaining a Language Glossary:

Glossaries are the index books maintained by professional translators and localization linguists. These are vital resources that have specific terminologies and culturally approved words for usage. By having a glossary, the professional can be sure that particular terms used in the translation and localization processes are correct and appropriate to add.  A language glossary is a highly effective collection and is already created with the support of a Language Service Provider (LSP) and the client, thus giving the customer satisfaction in the expected outcome. 

Adding the Right Unicode: 

The HTML (hypertext markup language) webpages usually have a multilingual code text that represents the ‘document character set’. And this representation is called the Unicode. A Unicode will assign a specific sequence of bytes for pages and give numbers to each external code or character. Now, the role of a Unicode in localization is that the professional will ensure if the standard Code (s) like UTF-8 are processable with high accuracy. By setting the correct Unicode for a given HTML web page, it will display your website’s elements perfectly in the required target language. 

User Interface Management:

Voice-over translation projects do not have visible issues with user interface (UI) since a website’s video and audio elements do not get altered much on an alignment basis. But when it comes to translating and localizing a website, both these processes must separately get a thorough evaluation of the target language’s sentence formation and grammatical nuances. Because, when an English website gets translated to Russian or Indian languages, then the formatting and line alignment will vary. Managing such conditions can be challenging for a newbie and highly impossible for a general audience. Hence, hiring website localization services makes sense. 

Local Testing Procedures:

There is no room for errors and displayed bugs with website localization since professionals will surely test your platform by going online locally. With comprehensive testing procedures and other browser authentication methods, your website will be localized as per how your target audience wants the site to be viewed and experienced. Moreover, highly qualified professionals will also test your site for cross resolution checks, where your web page is divided as pixels and examined on a vertical and horizontal basis. It gives a sense of confidence on the website compatibility with any device.

Evaluate SMO:

The process of localization does not end with changing the language and context for the target audience. It continues to the next phase of optimizing your web page for social media. SMO or social media optimization is the second priority for many website localizers to ensure if the site ranks and complies with networking norms. A large population of individuals today open accounts and navigate websites with their social media platforms only. With more number of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn joiners, it is thus crucial to perform SMO for website localization, irrespective of your target audience and language. 

Precise Media Localization:

Last but not the least, experienced translators are not only skilful with the linguistic elements of a webpage; they can also perform a voice-over translation and culture-focused localization with accuracy. Professionals undergo training programmes before joining an agency as a localizer or translator. This way, they are proficient to do localisation even for audio, video, and other media file formats with high synchronization.

Since localization is a language service that involves both fluency in language skills as well as in the technical web aspects, it is therefore advisable to get things done from an experienced professional only. These experts balance their verbal skills with site-related aspects, proving that your website is localized with relevancy and appropriateness. [:]