What is localisation?
Put simply, localisation is adapting a text or translation to make it appropriate for the target market you are selling to. I’m sure we’ve all been there; you’re reading a piece of text and you notice a spelling that isn’t used in your country, an idiom that doesn’t mean anything to you, and is frankly a little baffling, or measurements that haven’t been used for decades. When this happens, you’re no longer concentrating on the text and the product, you’re just thinking about the strange things you’ve read.
Localisation can include converting currencies and measurements, amending idioms and country-specific references, changing date formats, adapting hyperlinks and so much more. Localisation is recommended for all text types where it is vital your meaning is understood by your readers.
The overarching aim of localisation is to make the reader feel like they are reading a text that has been written specifically for their market and not that selling to them was an afterthought. Just imagine going through the effort of copywriting a suitable text for one market, when it will potentially cause confusion in another if all the measurements are in feet and inches and your reader is only used to working in centimetres and metres.
