When we talk about internationalization, we’re talking about adapting your website (and, for tech companies, software/platform) so that it’s ready for translation and localization. This tip will help you answer:

How do I make sure that my site or product is structurally sound and able to handle localized content?

Internationalization to-dos include:

• Writing in unicode support to handle multilingual characters
• Externalizing strings (small lines of copy) so that translators don’t have to work in your code and so that strings can be updated all at once (think of buttons or frequently-used calls to action)
• Separating text from images to allow for use in multiple languages
• Removing hard-coded assumptions around date, time and currency so that these formats and numbers aren’t tied to one country or language
• Removing similar system settings around telephone numbers, systems of measurement, addresses and payment options
• Enabling databases to handle multilingual data
• Setting strategy for international web domains (e.g. country-specific domains and subdomains)
• Designing navigation portals between your international sites
• Enabling multibyte and right-to-left text support as needed (e.g. for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, etc.)

This is just a sampling of the major changes you should make to your website and/or product to prepare it for clean, easy, scalable translation and localization. Read more in our Going Global white papers here.

Read all of the tips in Gengo’s Going Global Countdown:

• #1: Choose your timing and timeline
• #2: Research and choose target markets
• #3: Define your offering and level of service
• #4: Build an internationally-minded team
• #5: Craft a working translation/localization strategy
• #6: Select the best translation tools and services
• #7: Internationalize properly
• #8: Translate cleanly
• #9: Check, double check, launch
• #10: Create a great global growth machine
• #11: Round it out with multilingual support
• #12: Kaizen! Optimize

Go global with Gengo’s people-powered translation platform.

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