Successful Globalization — An Orchestrated Piece of Design
This quote perfectly illustrates the very common initial approach of many companies that primarily focus on their domestic market, and then at some point decide to go global. With a minimum set of languages for their International markets, they quickly realize, however, that their overseas customers’ willingness to use software designed for the U.S. market, for instance, is not as strong as expected in non-English speaking countries.
Most customers, when offered the option, do actually prefer to use products in their native language. And there is so much more to it than just the language. What paying customers especially ask for is a native experience without the linguistic bumpiness that a word-for-word translation often provides. In order to achieve this goal, quite a few other cultural aspects need to be considered.
Handling of currencies, date and telephone number formats, different character sets, time zone differences, right-to-left writing, and other culture-related conventions have an impact on how a product is used and perceived by the user. These culture-related conventions also apply to marketing, support and training content, or services that accompany the product in order to provide a frictionless and smooth end-to-end customer experience which, ideally, does not reveal the provenance and language of the original source product.
It’s at this point where localization and pre-step internationalization take a key role.
The Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) defined internationalization and localization as follows:
Internationalization (also referred to as i18n where the number represents the number of letters omitted):
“Internationalization is the process of generalizing a product so that it can handle multiple languages and cultural conventions without the need for re-design. Internationalization takes place at the level of program design and document development.”
In other words, i18n is the inevitable step to achieve readiness for localization, meaning to enable localizability (l12y).
Localization (sometimes abbreviated as l10n):
“Localization involves taking a product and making it linguistically and culturally appropriate to the target locale (country/region and language) where it will be used and sold.”
And since we’re at it:
Globalization (often written as g11n):
“Globalization addresses the business issues associated with taking a product global. In the globalization of high-tech products this involves integrating localization throughout a company, after proper internationalization and product design, as well as marketing, sales and support in the world market.”
For a company planning to become a global player, the art of thinking and designing with globalization in mind is essential and should be part of every employee’s DNA and a key criterion that is checked when hiring. Products and content need to be designed in a way that allows for localization, even if the core market is the U.S. market. It’s going to be a very long and costly way if all existing content and product creators have to be retrained because the focus has been on the U.S. market only and the business is compelled to run initiatives to evoke awareness and build up knowledge in the field of globalization.
To some it may seem sufficient, as a first stab, to concentrate on products and information collaterals to enter international markets. However, to get it right and become established and stay in these markets, the entire customer journey needs to be considered: offering, conclusion of contracts, onboarding, training, sales and after-sales-support, customer success, retention, nurturing, renewal, innovation and outlook — across time zones and with constant high availability. If only parts of these stages represent a smooth experience and others represent a mix of English and X, or English-only, or are non-existent, the customer experience will be broken and clearly reveal the necessity for amendments that the business should undertake to their international customers’ service to win them over for good and make them truly happy.
Is English a competitive advantage? Yes, especially for the globally savvy competition.
Successful globalization can only take place if the business is mature enough and prepared to invest in adequate and well-orchestrated globalization activities and a strategy everyone in the business can align with. Only then are both internationalization and localization possible and likely to be successfully implemented. Going global triumphantly requires a conscious business decision as well as an open and determined commitment from the management to enter international markets. Without a thorough analysis of potential markets, ROI, and a univocally communicated strategy to the whole organization, it will be difficult to make the right decisions on priorities and resources crucial to executing that strategy as well as to define who owns success in those respective markets.
