Globalization and Language Localization for Enterprise Content

The web is global by default, but that doesn’t mean your content automatically resonates with a global audience. European markets respond differently than East Asian markets, which in turn respond differently than South American markets. Within each of those broader regions, there are language and cultural differences at the country and local levels that further complicate communication.  

Even with perfect translation to Spanish, a message that resonates in Spain may not resonate in Mexico due to both language variation and cultural differences between the two countries.

Localization is more than just translating from the language of your source content to another language. It provides a better customer experience, helping you engage a larger and more diverse audience. It’s also more complicated than installing a plugin that calls Google Translate. 

You need to understand that an idiom written in your English copy has no meaning when translated directly to German or Italian. Localization requires you to consider how to modify text to resonate locally without diluting your brand message globally.

It can be tempting to let regional teams make independent decisions about how to communicate in-region, but that comes with its own risks and price. Without governance for your global content strategy, you might:

• Lose brand consistency between markets.
• Increase exposure to compliance risks known at headquarters but less understood regionally.
• Fragment messaging in ways that impact business outcomes.
• Disclose sensitive information.

To achieve enterprise scale for your globalization efforts, you need to build a scalable localization strategy that includes a clear structure, governance, and a per-language plan that enables you to achieve a central set of business outcomes.

How enterprises approach languages, locales, and market variants

The starting point for your globalization program is to align on an approach to source language that can be scaled to localized content. Once you have a defined source language, you can start looking at how to localize.

Typically, localization is defined at each of four levels. Keep in mind that the cost of creating and maintaining localized content tends to increase as the strategy becomes more granular. So it’s important to identify which content to localize and in which languages. To help decide this, examine the risks of misinterpretation and compliance requirements.

Regions, countries, markets, and dialects are the four primary locale structures to consider when developing a globalization strategy.

Regions like EMEA, LATAM, and APAC are often used as levels for governance and resource sharing. An example of this might be using a shared set of creatives throughout Latin American countries to reduce costs. 

Regions can also represent a common regulatory framework. The European Union is one example of a body with a shared set of rules, including GDPR, for engaging with its member countries.

Localizing at the country level is often driven by a combination of compliance requirements, infrastructure, and the national language.

Any country that has its own language requires a unique localization strategy.

Legal compliance is often defined per country, which can impact your localization approach. Even within the EU, there are country nuances, like Germany and France requiring user data to be stored within their geographic boundaries.

With the exception of the EU, where member countries use a common currency, a country typically sets the level of localization for currency and payments.

The market is a highly nuanced layer of localization that can span governmental borders or reflect differences within the same country. In Europe, one common market cluster is the German-speaking populations of Austria, Switzerland, and Germany due to a shared language and common purchasing behaviors.

In LATAM, Brazil is often considered separately from the rest of South America due to the fact that Portuguese, not Spanish, is spoken there.

Dialect represents the cultural and linguistic layer of localization. This is where expertise in local nuances is important to maintain brand resonance. Common considerations include:

• Language variation: A common example here is the differences between Spanish in Spain and Mexico.
• Dialect: Australian, British, and American English all have differences. Similarly, Quebecois French is different than the French spoken throughout France.
• Cultural nuance: Idioms, humor, and imagery frequently don’t translate directly between languages and cultures.

One of the more challenging aspects of globalization is finding the right balance between centralized governance and a level of regional autonomy to make decisions. Defining clear lines around which aspects of your global content are defined centrally vs. which are owned by a regional team helps maintain consistency and avoids brand confusion. 

Some areas to focus on include:

• Variant control: Defining a clear structure around the fan out from source language content to regional and local variants, including who maintains those variants.
• Fallback behavior: What happens when the preferred local variant isn’t available? Is the source language shown? Is a less preferred regional variant shown?
• Content ownership: Drawing clear lines around which team within your organization owns decisions like which markets and locales are localized and who maintains those localizations.
• Cost per market: Localization comes with a cost. Scalable content architectures designed around a centralized strategy reduce the cost to launch per locale from months of preparation and thousands of dollars, to days of time and a fraction of the cost.

Core components of scalable localization workflows

Scalable localization workflows include a set of core components that make achieving global scale feasible.

• Source content readiness and workflows create the foundation for the rest of your localization pipeline. By creating consistency around when your source content is ready to feed into the rest of the localization flow, you establish a consistent feed of content from source assets to localized assets.
• Translation Management System (TMS) integrations and translation memory are tools that facilitate streamlined translation. TMS integrations provide an orchestration layer to feed in new source content that fans out to all required translation output. Translation memory helps keep costs down by preventing retranslation of frequently used words and phrases. 
• Structured metadata provides consistency within a region or locale. By defining metadata requirements as part of central governance, it guarantees that content assets are correctly tagged for individual regions and locales.
• Review, QA, and compliance tracking across teams maintains quality and avoids regulatory risk throughout the localization process.
• Analytics and feedback loops are defined at the market, locale, and language levels to both improve quality overtime and understand content performance within your localization strategy.

How WordPress VIP supports globalization and localization at scale

WordPress VIP includes a number of key features that support globalization and localization strategies at scale. The foundation for this scalable infrastructure is multisite support, which can be defined either as localized subdomains or subdirectories nested beneath your root domain. You control how you want to define additional sites as part of your localization strategy.

Other key ingredients are also built-in to WordPress VIP.

• Structured content and taxonomy allow you to define your strategy at the locale, region, and market levels. Using a schema coupled with metatags, you more easily communicate: “This content is in Spanish, but it is specifically for LATAM.”
• Permissions, workflows, and governance across distributed teams dictate which parts of your organization have access and are responsible for individual components of your localization workflow.
• Support for leading localization and translation integrations including Phrase and Smartling, multilingual functionality, in addition to a number of new AI-driven agents.
• Reliability, performance, and auditability provide confidence that your localization strategy is both working as expected and delivering to meet your business outcomes.
• Data residency and compliance meets regional requirements around data sovereignty. This helps make sure you are meeting regulatory requirements within all markets globally.

Outcomes enterprises expect from a strong localization architecture

Executing on your globalization and localization strategy means meeting expectations in local markets and achieving your business outcomes. Some key outcomes include:

• Cultural relevance and brand resonance translated to increased trust in local markets, coupled with the potential for additional growth resulting from meeting local user expectations.
• Faster expansion into new regions and markets by leveraging streamlined workflows and processes.
• Consistency across brands, markets, and languages globally while maintaining the flexibility to adjust your message to meet local market expectations.
• Reduced duplication and operational overhead through the use of workflows specifically designed and optimized to support your localization use cases.
• Clear performance insight by locale, region, and audience by using your content structure and taxonomy as a foundation for analytics fidelity.
• Confidence in compliance and editorial quality by establishing clear content publishing workflows that include governance and review layers to verify compliance.
• Agility in publishing when urgency matters, such as when you need to quickly respond to a worldwide crisis. Your streamlined workflows will make it easier to quickly move from source content to multiple localized versions at enterprise speed.

Positioning localization as a solution-level strength

Localization isn’t just a feature of a great content management system — it’s a core operating model that leverages the capabilities of the CMS to effectively scale your business needs from one to many locales. This operating model requires the platform to be flexible in how you define your localization goals. It also demands that governance be a key component and establish consistency, whether you are expanding to one or hundreds of additional locales. 

WordPress VIP offers this flexible, scalable model, complete with end-to-end governance without requiring any additional complex integrations. You have the ability to expand from one to many locales immediately. Your team dictates the strategy for when and how you expand.