Three Examples of Localization Beyond Words to Help You Get buy-in from Stakeholders

As a content designer, I’m always thinking about the best way to communicate — and that goes beyond just English. Our field is keenly aware of the impact of localization, but unfortunately, it’s often something that companies struggle to do well.

If I think about the clients I’ve worked with, I can group most of them into the following broad personas:

🌎 The ones who take it seriously. Oh yes, they have it figured out. They’re aware of the difference between localization, transcreation, and translation. They even use abbreviations like l10n and i18n throughout the team, and they run experiments in different markets to find the best way to adapt their products to each culture and group of users. They may even have internal natives representing each language and detailed style guides on the differences between languages. Oh, and they have differences in text across US and UK English — beyond just changing a couple of Zs to S and inserting the letter U in certain words.

🙂 The ones who just want the words changed. For them, localization and translation are the same. They send their copy off, maybe with context, but often without, and receive back the same copy in another language. Translation is a necessity because their strategies involve other markets, however, they get frequent feedback on the quality of their non-English products. It’s not a priority to improve, though — they’re just focused on the US anyway.

🥀 The ones who think English is good enough for everyone. If this company were a person, they’d go to Spain on holiday and be upset that sausages in the hotel’s full English taste funny. Everyone speaks English nowadays anyway, don’t they? Plus, it’s expensive to get translations.

While the first kind of company is a dream to collaborate with, the second kind is more common. Often, if you mention localization to teams in this company, they’ll be grateful for any help, but it can take a bit of work to get buy-in and change the view that localization is purely about words.

So, I want to share a couple of examples of localization beyond words that I regularly use to get buy-in at such companies.

(And as for the third kind of company? Good luck to them sticking around long enough to be successful if this attitude towards localization is indicative of their approach towards UX and product…