Bridging the corporate communications gap with localization

Need for Localization

If we pay attention to some statistics, we will notice that over 70% of the population are non-English speakers . Even amidst the English speaking groups, there exist versions of the language as per region, e.g., American English differs from British English in terms of spellings and some common nouns etc.

Similarly, English in Europe varies as one moves through countries – it gets colloquial in some countries, and it gets a different grammar form of English in some others.

The nature of communication also changes as per the intended tone. For example – if you need to exchange pleasantries with someone, there are some local phrases that you need to know and understand well. If you have to share instructions, the intent of your communication changes; you need to be well-aware and be mindful to not end up being disrespectful to your listeners.

There’s also a variation of English in its spoken and written forms. Yet again, depending on your channel of communication, you need to be understanding of the differences. While some variations can be subtle, as your business grows and spends time in a new market, you get assessed by how well you update your Customer Communications for your users.

For countries like Hungary, China, Japan, The Gambia, Malawi, Colombia, Swaziland, Brazil, Russia, Argentina, Algeria, Uganda, Yemen, Chile and Tanzania, the population of English speakers is less than 10%. India, which has a large market for any-sized businesses, is home to more than 400 million people who cannot read or write in English.

Consequently, when international and local businesses try to send communications to them through various English channels, most users fail to understand what they are trying to convey.

Why organizations never look beyond a default language for communication?

There are various reasons why organizations still focus only on English as their primary language when they communicate with their customers. Primarily because by sticking to one language and keeping it English, they can save up on many costs since English is a popular language used across the globe, even if less than 400 million global consumers have English as their native language.

To reach most users, translation into various native languages is still done at a fundamental level using either open-sourced technologies or by doing translations manually.

Both these approaches are not very scalable, and the complexities keep rising as the volume of customer communication grows over time. Apart from this, open-sourced technologies do not consider the contexts of customer communications, such as looking into the tone, the semantics, and the delivery style, which may apply to a particular scenario but may not work for all scenarios.

Since most customer communications need to be objective-driven and controlled, achieving this in multiple languages may take a lot of effort to maintain and fulfill. For manual translation processes, one would need to hire resources who can perform the translations and get the communications from concept to execution. Thus, as the business grows, the cost to manage manual translation processes and hire personnel increases exponentially.

Some Interesting stats around localization

There are many reasons why personalized and localized customer communication is essential. Across various sectors like healthcare, banking, insurance, retail and legal – users have shown purchase behaviors that are positively impacted if they get communications from businesses in their local languages.