Are you making web globalization rookie mistakes?

I recently contributed an article to Multilingual Magazine about some of the most common rookies mistakes I’ve seen over the years.

These mistakes are easy to avoid — assuming you’re aware of them. Too many web and marketing teams sadly are not.

Here’s one of the five:

1. Under-localization

Imagine landing on a website in which all of the text is in your language. But when you select a link to learn more, you are taken to content in a different language, possibly a language you do not even understand.

So you back up and try a different link, leading you to a similarly indecipherable page. If you encounter additional dead ends, you will most likely resort to copy and pasting the website URL into Google Translate.

Sadly, this is an all-too-common internet experience for hundreds of millions of people around the world. Because not only do companies not support the necessary languages of the world’s 5.2 billion internet, even when they do support a language they sometimes don’t support enough of that language to create a positive user experience. I call this “under-localization.”