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Why Localize?

The advent of the computer age and the mass acceptance and proliferation of personal computers have enabled companies to go global, creating competition where relatively none existed before. Particularly, enormous opportunities have come out within the emerging and rapidly expanding Asian market. The Asian region's Internet population increased to 40 million by the end of 2000, spending $7.3 billion on e-commerce purchases. At the end of 2000, Japan had the largest subscriber base in Asia-Pacific with 24.4 million, followed by South Korea with 16.7 million, China (14.6 million) and Taiwan (4.6 million). Together, these top four countries accounted for 76 percent of the region's Internet subscribers in 2000 according to Gartner's Dataquest. And this shows how big Asian market’s potential is and how important localization in these four languages is.

How Important Is Localization?

The percentage of users who do not speak English as their native language has grown to nearly 50% and in Asia, this number has increased very significantly. Then, what should you do to reach Asian users? Are you communicating effectively with your Asian customers? If not, linguistic and cultural differences are your major barrier to be broken first. Building customer relationships is critical to long-term success and localization is the best way to have effective communications with customers and partners.

Whether you are a company seeking to tap Asian market or wanting to share contents over the Internet, localization is no longer an option. If you want to compete globally, localization is another necessary process added to the product development cycle. It will open up vast market to you.

What is Localization?

Localization is the process of translating and adapting the product to local language and culture so that end users can easily use and understand the product. Since the localization process includes translation, technical review, desktop publishing, compiling, and testing procedures, it requires sophisticated and professional know-how and appreciation on language, technology and culture.

Importance of Successful Localization

To put it briefly, Asian users are not willing to purchase your product if the product and its documentation are not precisely localized to suit each market. If customers see linguistic and technical errors, cultural taboos or inappropriately applied conventions in your product, the customer is not strongly encouraged to purchase your product again. Also, Asian users have tendency to buy successfully localized products in their own language so that they can easily understand and use the product. Successful localization improves market share and strengthens relationship with customers, thereby enhancing competitiveness and customer’s loyalty towards your product.