When you’re building a website which will be viewed by people from different cultures and countries, it is important to build it so that it can be easily and efficiently translated into different languages (internationalization), and then to provide versions of the content that are optimized for the relevant country and culture (localization).
Website localization is more than translating the website into the target language; it is important to take the local culture and economy into account as well. This involves user and market research in the target country.
Technical considerations
In order to offer your website in multiple languages and locales, you need to use a framework where you can interpolate the text in different languages. You may want to use machine translation, but you will also need to ensure that the translations fit the context, so human intervention is also needed.
Let the visitor decide
It is best to let the visitor select what language they want to read your site in, rather than using geo-location to decide for them. The visitor may be a Spanish speaker living in a majority-English country; or the country may have two official languages, like Canada.
Cultural considerations
Different countries have different standards for date formatting, weights and measures, currencies, shoe sizes, clothing sizes, paper sizes, voltage, and more, so it is important to take these details into consideration when preparing your website for an international audience. Then there are cultural considerations like names of products. We have all seen hilarious examples of product naming going horribly wrong, when a word that is perfectly innocuous in one language turns out to mean something offensive in another language. And there are more subtle considerations such as things that seems cute to one culture may seem unnatural or ugly to another culture.
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