From the traditional Black Friday sales in the US to the Singles’ Day in China, bustling high streets have been replaced by virtual queues. The commerce market has been transformed into a digital environment and further charged by lockdown spending. Only by localising the website, can businesses attract global customers and stand out from the stiff competition in the dynamic and volatile environment of e-commerce. Here are five common mistakes that should be avoided.
1. Lack of native touch
Some brands or products rely on casual use of language to create a sincere or friendly attitude in the website. Using free and automatic machine translation, creating word-for-word translation of idioms, jokes and metaphors, would generate awkward translation. It is absurd to make a mistake like “Eat your fingers off”, a translation from the catchword of KFC “Finger-lickin’ Good” into Chinese again. A non-native translator may also fail to retain the cultural context of the original message.
2. Missing components
It is true that the use of images in place of text on an e-commerce site can simplify international customers’ understanding. Yet, it is also important that an image or a video containing text should be recreated using localised text. From product descriptions, to the details, buttons, captions and footnotes, all content on the website should be localised so as to convey security and confidence to foreign customers.
SEO is paramount to asserting a distinct presence and the SEO tactics changes slightly depending on the local language. Businesses should discern how to best apply the keywords and pitches to unique markets and localise the keywords, ensuring the translations are able to hold up on search engines.
3. Confusing units
As 55% of consumers prefer online shopping in their mother language, a localised website is a fundamental requirement for most online shoppers. To further provide a seamless shopping experience, details including formats of numbers, dates, time and addresses; currencies; units of measurements; design and layout, should be displayed and formatted using the conventions of the local customer.
4. Missing characters
The Unicode standard provides a unique code for every character, regardless of platform, device and application. However, the data runs the risk of corruption when passing through other computers or between different encodings. If the e-commerce site is not enabled to support Unicode, it may fail to correctly display certain symbols and letters with non-ASCII characters, such as Japanese and Chinese.
5.Incomplete customer service
Apart from the website and products, customer engagement and smooth communication is vital in the retail environment. Leaving customers unassisted by not offering localized customer service can be equally if not more frustrating on the consumer’s behalf than a poorly translated website. Localising all customer services such as chatbots and service emails is the key to create a ultimate shopper experience and build customer loyalty.
Translating an e-commerce site with the help of free translation tools could easily be mistaken as an easy task but it is not uncommon to see a poorly localised website, damaging a brand image. Elite Asia is a reputable language service provider in the media and marketing industry. Our linguists can localise your website in high speed by operating in an automated process and seamless integration with Translation Memory System.
