Businesses attempt to
go global for many reasons.

Some do it to capture
additional market share, while others venture into the global scene to take
advantage of unique opportunities.

Irrespective of the
reason, creating a global product requires a lot of planning and research in
order to be culturally appropriate by catering to diversity within individual
markets (through localization). But at the same time, your product has to be
designed to meet user needs in many regions (Internationalization). The latter
primarily involves creating a product one can easily modify.

In this blog post, we
explore the global expansion journey and how internationalization helps
facilitate this process.

The global expansion journey

For most enterprises,
global expansion almost seems like an inevitable event waiting to happen. But
what does it really entail?

Well, we like to look
at it from two perspectives; the external scene and the internal. The former
comprising components like; import regulations, local trade policies,
distribution ecosystem, etc., while the latter involves the product,
advertisement, messaging, branding and others.

Skillfully navigating
these components and how they affect one another is oftentimes crucial to a
successful global expansion story, but for the sake of this article, we want to
limit our scope to the internal perspective of the expansion journey.

Why do you need to internationalize?

Simply put,
internationalization makes your brand’s global expansion more efficient. If
done in the early stages of your global expansion, internationalization saves
you valuable time and resources, especially if a decent portion of your
resources are going toward re-adapting your platform for another market.

It is particularly
significant when you have digital products like; a web platform or software.
While developing your software, for instance, you should adopt a universal
format for your UI elements to allow room for variation in text size in the
event when you are adding more languages to your platform.

This singular action
makes it faster to deploy updates across regions without anyone feeling left
out, thus improving the user experience, which we covered in a previous post.

The same applies to
non-digital products. Internationalization helps develop content and messages
that brands can easily translate without any significant meaning lost during
translation. It could involve using simplistic and culturally neutral language
that has global application, which makes the adaption process to other
languages easy and free from controversies.

A good blend of localization and internationalization
could lead to global success.

Internationalization,
if well-executed, makes re-adapting your platform or content seamless and ready
for the next phase of your global journey. The next phase being localization.

It is worthy to point
out that by general definition, l10n and i18n are polar opposites that work in
unison to deliver a globalized product with a smooth user experience, as one does not function adequately without the other.

While
internationalization could be one-off, we cannot say the same for localization,
since brand’s need to continue to adapt their various strategies based on
consumer feedback in order to get the best results.

Case Study: Netflix’s Global Success

After making
significant headway in its local (American) market, Netflix set its sight on
the global scene, setting out for international expansion in 2010 first into
Canada and Latin American, then later, Europe.

Netflix present
success is most likely down to user experience, which it continuously attempts
to localize. Besides creating local content for its diverse audiences, it goes
one step further to creating translations and dubbed version of most of its
shows.

An indication of
Netflix’s focus on users experience is their internationalization’s team
creation of Shakespeare,
which is a tool that facilitates collaboration between their content designers,
copywriters, language managers etc., to deliver a platform experience that
brings the best conversion.

The bottom line

Although many brands
think of global expansion as an excruciating endeavour, it doesn’t really have
to be that way if proper planning and the initial groundwork transpires. A
great way to develop your platform/content for global expansion is starting out
with internationalization and then subsequently localizing to deliver the best
experience for your consumers. Internationalization improves efficiency by
making subsequent expansion to other regions happen in a faster and
cost-effective manner.

TranslationsinLondon
offers superb translation and
localization services that make your global expansion journey easier and a lot
faster.

Reach out to us today to find out how our localization services can
help you build an exceptional platform for any market.