At Gengo, we’re often approached by companies looking to globalize their websites or products for the first time. In our earlier white papers, we looked in detail at what startups and mid-sized businesses should consider before entering global markets.

For companies preparing internally for the globalization process, here are three quick checklists that cover the essentials.

Internationalization

(The engineering and source work needed before you can adapt your product/website/app to a particular country):

1. Unicode support to handle multilingual characters
2. String externalization so that translators don’t have to work in your code
3. Separate text from images to allow use in multiple locales
4. Date, time, currency localization (take out hard-coded locale assumptions)
5. Enable databases to handle multilingual data
6. Set strategy for international web domains (e.g. country-specific domains and sub-domains)
7. Design international gateway (navigation between your international sites)
8. International network response times (e.g. do you need a CDN?)
9. Multibyte and right-to-left enablement as needed (e.g. for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, etc.)
10. Global authoring tools (for some content; by simplifying your English source text, you can make translation easier)

Localization/translation

(The work of adapting the language of a product/website/app to a particular geographic locale):

1. Acquire and configure your web domains; decide strategy if some are taken
2. Pick localization strategies for different types of content: traditional vs. crowd vs. machine
3. SEO keyword localization and international SEO plan (e.g. avoiding mixed language and duplicate content)
4. Translation resources identified (outsourced vs. internal)
5. Connect translation process to your CMS if you have one
6. Determine translation memory management needs and methods
7. Identify strategies and resources for review process
8. Determine tools/connectors needed for localization workflow management
9. Configure quality system to track internationalization and localization defects
10. Assign tools and processes for localization metrics reporting

Business global readiness

(Areas that need special attention when globalizing):

1. Customer support agents able to handle non-English queries/cases
2. Knowledge base available in target languages with live connection to translation service
3. Marketing email system is able to handle emails in target languages
4. Online ads adapted to locale
5. Community content moderators able to handle international content
6. Website analytics set up for international sites
7. PR/marketing resources identified for target geos
8. CRM system and sales team equipped to handle multinational leads
9. Geo-specific partner ecosystem strategy in place
10. Globalization expense tracking and reporting plan in place

These top tens are high-level reminders of the rich mix of strategies, plans and tools needed for successful international deployments. Localizing a website or product requires special care, but we’re happy to help you plan for it early on.

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