Beyond Translation: Design for Localization

There’s much more to website localization than mere translation! Anyone looking to adapt their site for a new international audience needs to meet the specific cultural and linguistic preferences of their target market. And given the impact visual content has on consumers, this makes modifying design elements a must.

By considering localization at the beginning of the design journey, you’ll be able to avoid costly redesigns and ensure an excellent user experience for the end result. Sites with localized design elements tend to enjoy greater levels of user engagement, a wider market reach, and more satisfied customers.

Dr. Donald A. DePalma of CSA Research pointed out that “If a company chooses to not localize the buying experience, they risk losing 40% or more of the total addressable market.” And who can afford to alienate such numbers?

Let’s take a look at the best practices and tools required to boost your localization designs and create digital experiences that will truly wow your global audience.

Best Practices for Designing a Localized User Interface

Designing a localized User Interface (UI) requires a deep understanding of cultural context and nuances, in order to create an effective User Experience (UX). By following the localization strategies outlined below, you can ensure that your website design is always culturally relevant.

Research Target Markets

Conducting thorough cultural research is essential for effective localization. Understanding the local context, legal requirements, and commonly accepted notations of the target market will help to guide your design decisions.

Be aware of local nuances that can impact design choices, such as color symbolism, iconography, and user behavior patterns. For example, Germans prefer detailed product information over glitzy adverts, whereas other countries like America are less risk-averse when shopping. Involving local experts or native speakers in the localized design process can help ensure cultural appropriateness.

Relevant Data Formats

To ensure that all written content appears in a way that readers would expect, be sure to translate all content, including data formats. These should be adjusted so they match local conventions (e.g. dates should be written in a MM/DD/YYYY format in the US vs. DD/MM/YYYY in Europe).

Switch between 12-hour and 24-hour time formats depending on local preferences, and format numbers according to local customs, including the use of decimal points and thousand separators. When it comes to pricing, ensure that it is in the local currency, and convert measurements to local units (e.g. miles to kilometers, pounds to kilograms) wherever they occur.

Adapt Visual Elements

Visual elements such as colors, images, and icons can have different meanings in different cultures. For example, white may signify purity in some cultures but mourning in others. To ensure inclusivity, avoid imagery and avatars representing a single culture, gender, or demographic.

Adapt icons and graphics to be easily understood and culturally relevant. Spotify, for instance, tailors its visual style to match different cultural preferences. Ensure your layout remains functional and visually appealing across different languages and regions by using dynamic width and height. A responsive design that adapts to various screen sizes and orientations is a must for ensuring a consistent UX across different devices.

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Adjust Language and Communication Styles

Language and communication styles differ across cultures, affecting how information is presented and consumed. Adapt your designs for languages that read from right-to-left, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu, or Kashmiri. You can account for text expansion or contraction in different languages by designing flexible layouts and avoiding fixed-width containers.

Use global fonts, like Google Noto, that support multiple languages and character sets, ensuring consistent and legible text across different scripts and regions. Ensure both language and tone are culturally appropriate, and change idioms, examples, and references as needed. Weglot’s ability to provide accurate first-layer translations and the option to pre-select a formal or informal tone of voice can greatly speed up the process.

Usability Testing with Local Experts

Ensuring that the localized UI is intuitive and aligns with user expectations is vital. Conduct usability testing with local users or professional translators to identify culture-specific issues that need improvement. Weglot’s post-editing tools allow you to achieve the translation quality you require, by allowing human experts to refine your content on-page.

Provide Visual Context to Translators

Providing visual context to translators is essential for accurate translations, leading to more effective UI designs. Use tools and techniques such as screenshots, mockups, and in-context translation tools to provide such context. Weglot’s Visual Editor allows designers and translators to see translations and images as they’ll appear, so designs can be adapted around content, ensuring a user-friendly end result.

Centralizing Localization Design Management with Weglot

Weglot offers a no-code, user-friendly website translation solution for web designers, UX/UI designers, product managers, developers, marketers and localization professionals. The powerful translation management solution features automatic content detection and translation, plus visual frontend editing that accelerates the localization design process, no matter what Content Management System (CMS) you use.

Weglot’s centralized dashboard enables much easier management of localization projects. Through a single interface, you can review translations, SEO metadata, and media files all in one place, as well as communicate with translation teams or other partners. Other main features include:

• Automatic content detection: This function scans and detects all of the content on your website, eliminating the need for manual content gathering and ensuring continuous detection of new content or pages. For example, if you add a new blog post in your site’s core language, Weglot will automatically translate the content into your other languages.
• Visual translation editing: With this tool, you can edit your translations directly within your website’s design and structure, allowing you to see exactly what your translated page will look like. This ensures that your localized content not only reads well but also looks great and fits into your existing design. You can also translate media files, so your visual elements communicate with your audience just as well as your content.

• Integrated translation management tools: Weglot’s integrated translation management tools ease collaboration between team members and professional translators. You can approve, edit, and manage your machine translations with your localization team and/or translators, ensuring accuracy and cultural relevance. Complete editing control is vital to ensure accurate and relevant translations.
• Professional translation services: If these are required, you can order them directly from your Weglot Dashboard. This streamlines the process of working with external translators, allowing you to manage all aspects of your localization project from one central location.

Real-World Application: Image Localization with Know Your Lemons

Know Your Lemons is a non-profit organization with a mission to raise breast cancer awareness globally. Their unique approach, featured on their Squarespace website, uses lemons to represent breast cancer symptoms, transcending cultural and social taboos.

While these visual elements make the campaign’s message clear and accessible to a global audience, the foundation’s major concern was being able to show its images in different languages.

Fortunately, Weglot makes it easy to assign a new image for each language, and for this to switch in line with user preferences. By adding ten languages to their site, Know Your Lemons eliminated the need for multiple websites.

Weglot’s impact on Know Your Lemons was significant, with traffic increases of 1518% and 1185% to their respective German and Dutch-language pages. Overall, the organization achieved a 30% increase in traffic by expanding its outreach to 99 countries.

Weglot’s simple and efficient website translation qualities helped Know Your Lemons save more lives and educate more people than ever before.

Take the Next Step in Localization Design with Weglot

Localization in design is a necessity for creating engaging, culturally-relevant experiences that appeal to global audiences. By integrating localization into the design phase, you can improve the UX, increase market reach, and boost customer satisfaction.

Weglot simplifies manual content localization processes through its Visual Editor and image translation features. A user-friendly, no-code solution, it enables you to automatically translate and choose from 110+ languages to add to your site, saving you time and money while increasing conversions and traffic.

Take the next step in your localization design journey with Weglot and unlock your brand’s full potential with a 14-day free trial.