As a foreign languages translation partner, we’re equipped to fuel the extension of your global reach.

When new horizons await you ahead, it makes no sense to not cash in.

All successful people have one thing in common: they don’t sit on past laurels. They push themselves to limits every time they set their eyes on a new target. Business is no different in that respect. 

Once you’ve achieved success in the home market, you should not hesitate to move overseas. With the right set of strategies by your side, it’s time you begin your global expansion.

Why Global Expansion is Important for a Business?

The global expansion improves the visibility of your products and services by making them available to a broader audience. As more customers explore and get exposed to your products and services, the conversion rate will go up and so will sales. As sales grow, businesses generate more profits.

Two things are extremely important when it comes to international expansion: the availability of opportunities and ease of access.

The globalized economy promises both. As a result, many businesses have foreign expansion on their agenda. With priorities given to selling products and services overseas in order to boost customer base and sales. 

Though the opportunities are plenty, executing the plan for the international expansion of business is uphill. In other words, global expansion of business pays off huge dividends, which you can leverage to expand your business to new frontiers.

What are the Benefits of Global Expansion?

• • • Access to new markets is one of the top benefits of global expansion, one that helps a local business harness the power of a global customer base.
    • Entering overseas markets paves the way for an increase in business growth and global footprint.
    • Each market houses workers with unique skill sets, which foreign expansion allows a business to tap into by expanding there.
    • International expansion is a great way to lower operational costs. Plus, it helps a business beat the competition by hiring local workers to serve local clients in their local language.

International Expansion Business Plan

Whether you name it international expansion strategy or plan for international expansion, one hasn’t fixed steps or a combination of steps to follow verbatim so to fuel your business’s international journey. 

Much depends on facts or data, and when combined with a tinge of intuition or gut instinct, you have a perfect recipe for international business expansion. 

• What are your primary markets of focus?
• Who are your target customers?
• Is your product offering or service customized for your target audience? 
• How much of your resources are you willing you allocate to your new market?
• How to overcome language barriers in international business and in your new workplace?

If you can answer each one of these questions, know that you have a definitive business expansion plan ready by yourself, awaiting implementation.

However, that doesn’t abate the challenge of globalization businesses face today. You need robustly built and data-driven internationalization strategies in order to identify new markets for your business. 

And that does also mean adapting your products and services to local twists so as to develop into a multinational corporation.

How to Adapt a Product or Service to a New Market?

Going global is valuable, but how do you adapt to the global marketplace?

It’s simple to answer but hard to do. In writing, all it demands is adapting your products and services to a foreign market when planning business expansion.

Difficulties arise when you factor in language and cultural differences. These elements small businesses deemed detrimental to their plans of foreign expansion. And consequently, believe that foreign expansion is the monopoly of big corporations only. It’s natural to feel overwhelmed sometimes, but once you have been provided with solutions to overcome your fears, it becomes stupid!

In different markets, people have different expectations and needs. One way to gauge that is by knowing their language. If you don’t know the language of the people you plan to serve you might never know what they want.

The language will enable you to effectively market your product and service and is perhaps the best product adaptation strategy you’d ever come across. Without changing the core attributes of your product or service, it will adopt it to reflect the local market’s preferences and values.

Key Global Business Expansion Strategies

One of the ways of looking at the global expansion of business is that it’s a sort of pairing of local and global to expand the scope and reach of the business’s core expertise. Linguistic capabilities remain a key component of global business expansion strategies where it empowers global businesses to meet the unique language needs of their international audiences and clients.

Locate Translate is a translation company that specializes in translating, interpreting, transcribing, and localising critical business documents, including audio and video content, to serve the needs of specific regional audiences in the globalized marketplace.

Is Foreign Expansion Difficult?

No matter what you’ve believed so far, going global is not as difficult as it’s made out to be. By doing the right thing at the right time, you can be as successful as any big corporation.

Just focussing on how to expand can go a long way to help you sell in the global marketplace, instead of remaining stuck on whether or not you’re capable of doing so. Though it’s normal for small businesses to think this way, breaking out of the ideological barriers is the way forward. 

Play it smart and play it hard, you’ll get what you want.

Overcoming Foreign Market Entry Barriers [Fears]

Other than the genuine tangible barriers, businesses face ideological barriers bordering on fear which they need to overcome.

Some of the common entry barriers are –

• • • How can I communicate with people who speak a different language?
    • What if my target audience did not understand me, our product or our service?
    • How can I build the trust of my target audience and start selling upfront?

Often, questions, rather fear, like these will make you backtrack and give up on your global expansion dreams.

Understanding Glocalization

Fear will only drag your feet. You should aim for glocalization, instead. 

What is Glocalisation?

Glocalization is an oxymoron made of “globalization” and “localization.” 

What the term implies is that a product or a service is sold in a global marketplace but adjustments or realignment is made to meet the unique needs of the local market. So it’s global and local at the same time, hence glocal.

Adjustments provide the right way to adapt to the global marketplace. Think of the automobile industry selling globally. To meet local needs in terms of emission standards or steering side, they make adjustments accordingly. 

Fast-food restaurants chains appropriate their menu as local tastes or cultures or traditions demand.

If you’re planning to adapt to the global marketplace the way forward is through glocalization. Shortest to say, adapt your products or services to local markets you’re expanding to. That calls for necessary tailoring to align with local customs, laws, or preferences.

Adapting Products to a Foreign Market

Building on glocalisation, many brands have gone international. In every new market they have shifted to, they localised their products and services.

Be it Coca-Cola or KFC, they have been successful at localizing their products. Coca-Cola with their fruit drinks tailored for Shenzhen in China, and KFC with their porridge for the same Shanghai marketplace in China.

The key to their enormous success overseas is the way they adapt their products to the global marketplace.

Coca-Cola’s Okinawa limited bottle featuring famous sights in the region like Shureimon, a whale shark of Churaumi Aquarium, and a clownfish on the rear of the bottle, is the best example of a multinational brand’s localization strategy.

How can you Adapt Products and Services to the Global Marketplace?

Simply put, the adoption process begins at your first brush with an international marketplace when you realize for the first time the needs of your target audience.

Right there, begin preparations for adoption right away.

While you should keep your unique selling point intact, analysing your competition who’s been there before will help you leap forward more confidently. 

This all boils down to the way you approach your potential consumers in a foreign market. If you’re well informed about their preferences, linguistic and cultural differences, winning their trust and lasting loyalty will get easier.

The basic need of every business moving to a foreign market is language. Speaking to your target audience in the language they speak is key to communicating effectively with them.

Suppose you’ve got a Spanish speaking target audience, you might want to offer services in the Spanish language even if English is your major language.

3 Ways Language Solutions Can Help Businesses Adapt to New Market Conditions

1. Make it Easier for your Target Audience to Reach and Buy from your Business

The easier and decluttered you keep your buying process, the more your audience will come to trust your business. 

Step into your audience’s shoes to see things from their perspective. If you can easily find your business online, that means your audience too will find it easily. You may also want to invest in online advertising like PPC, Google Ads, etc. for quick results.

But the point is, how do you optimize PPC or search campaigns when you don’t know what terms in the local language your potential consumers search for on Google?

Language solutions can be deployed to localise campaigns and help with localized SEO. We will assign expert translators to translate your ad creatives and copies and interpreters for translating verbal language. 

2. Translate and Localize your Website Content, Marketing Material, and Business Documents

Translation and localisation services are key to your success in a foreign market. By overcoming the language barrier, you’re in for tremendous success. 

Whether it’s the website or marketing content, currency or address, graphics or cultural expressions, you need to translate and localize all such content into the local language in order to gain traction and encourage users to interact and engage with your business. 

Localisation will ensure your messaging takes into account the cultural sensibilities of your new market.

Similarly, when you translate business documents like employee contracts, local workers you hire for your business will have a better understanding of what terms and conditions they’re signing, which is imperative for winning their trust, hence loyalty. 

Communicating the right information might help turn potential consumers into returning customers. That’s the reason translation is vital for achieving success in the global marketplace.

A sure way to do that is by translating marketing materials, website content, user manuals, employee information bulletins, etc. and localizing currencies, calendars and date formats. That’s the way forward for a business to adapt to glocalization.

3. Adapt to New Culture by Taking Local Cultural Expressions into Account

The translation is good as far as written words are concerned but it falls short once you deal with new cultural circumstances. 

A simple translation fails to capture the essence of the cultural relevance of words or simply put, their cultural context. Words or expressions don’t occur in a vacuum. It’s the culture that gives them meaning. Whatever shortcomings translation has when it comes to replicating the cultural effects of a message, advertisement or website copy, are filled by transcreation.  

What is Transcreation?

Transcreation is the special form of translation used for the duplication of intent, emotion, context, and tone from the original message. 

Transcreation replicates the content of a message in such a creative way that it’s hard to tell apart the translated copy from the original. Such is the identical emotional experience one draws from the translated message as if it were a source message.

Also referred to as creative translation, transcreation involves transcreators adapting the campaign’s look and feel to the local market so that its message resonates. And that includes aligning imagery, colour, and layouts with the cultural preferences and sensibilities of local consumers. 

One thing to remember regarding potential customers is that if you want to woo them, appeal to their culture and language. By localising your business to the level that you’re no longer considered a foreign business but a local one, people begin to trust your business. 

With trust comes confidence which enables consumers to engage more frequently with your business and its influence spreads far and wide.

In fact, one of the major reasons why businesses fail to generate sales in the new markets or fail to adapt to the new market conditions can be attributed to the less attention being paid to cultural differences and the inability of a business to bridge the cultural gap, even when the language barrier has been overcome using translation.

Local markets and foreign markets represent two different sets of commercial entities. They don’t have separate needs but also separate means to address those needs. Believing that your business does cater to the local demands, what else you need to grow in the international market is translation, localisation and transcription to own your target market, not just sell to it.

How well we communicate with our target audience determines how well we sell our products and services. What that implies is we use language in myriad forms to sell. We have written content on our website, video advertisements with spoken as well as written content, product descriptions, albeit all in a language not spoken by our target audience.

Businesses when expanding to a foreign country often launch their business in haste. Without doing their groundwork as connecting to the local audience demands, they often have to call off their business operations within a year because they don’t get any sales.  Before selling actual products, you’ve to grab the attention of your audience linguistically, and use it to sell your business ideals and brand image!

You do that by realigning your business’s language to accommodate the local language and mindset. In comes localisation marketing to help businesses achieve the same. It’s here businesses need transcription services to communicate directly with their target audience. Exactly here, the role of translation agency becomes inevitable.

Grow your Business by Expanding to New Markets

As new foreign markets open up, your opportunity to scale your business multiplies.  So does your chance to grow exponentially. You may have done the groundwork necessary to expand to a foreign market but mistakenly left out translation, localisation, and transcription from your expansion strategy.

But, 

Is it even possible to successfully expand to a new market without onboarding transcription and translation services, and localisation services?

The answer is, no – not at all possible!

You may ask, why localization in marketing?

Impactful localized advertising lets your audience recognise your business in their language while taking into account the local cultural sensibilities so as not to offend. Localised content can help grow your business exponentially, which is reason enough to go for localisation marketing when aiming to expand.

Like others, you may also be wondering – fair enough, we need a localisation strategy to modify marketing content as behoves the linguistic and cultural needs of the local market. 

But why translation services?

To answer it in simple terms, for local markets, translation service is inevitable, and for translation, linguistic expertise is an absolute requisite. While that much is understood, what else you need to know is that nobody can claim to be a language and cultural expert particular to every local market.

The only way businesses can do away with linguistic barriers is by hiring a translation agency like Locate Translate, offering top-notch language solutions. Our translation company has the availability of in-house multilingual translators to cater to your language needs in new markets.

Suppose your target market is, say, in Nepal. You will require translation Nepali to English which your language partner, Locate Translate, offers with guaranteed quality. All at once, you’re saved from:

• Inaccurate machine translations, and
• Having to go through embarrassments due to inaccurate translations.

Localisation vs. Globalisation

Localisation and Globalisation are connected in such a way that it’s hard to part them away. In the changing economic landscape, expedited by technology, localisation and globalisation have been treading abreast.

No matter how far you go to do business, you’re still bound to do the necessary adjustments to cater to the local language and culture even in a globalised world. Markets have become global but local language and culture continue to dictate terms to the business language. 

Therefore, in localisation vs globalisation, we see both complementing each other. One opens the new markets, the other provides means to capture it! Over the years, globalisation has opened up a plethora of new markets, with localisation by your side you’re bound to make those new markets your own.

How Do Translation and Localisation Empower Businesses?

Every time you move to a new market, you don’t have to create new content – an expensive process – if you’ve partnered with a translation and localisation agency like Locate Translate. 

Consequently, it is not just cost-effective but cuts expenditure, too! It will propel you to enter new markets being prepared beforehand, and at once share localised content with your potential consumers.

Translation along with transcription services ensure that your website is accurately translated before introducing it to your target audience. Followed by app localization,  business document translations, hiring a translation agency ensures that top-notch subtitling and voice-over services are provided as and when needed by your business so that your growth is unhindered.

How Content Localisation Propels Growth by Improving Conversions?

Before we delve deeper into content localisation, first let’s understand what content localization is and what does localisation mean in the context of your business.

What is Localisation?

Localisation as a process is related to yet different from translation. 

Translation simply means to change the text written in one language (source) into another language (target). 

Localisation on the other hand involves not just translation but an adaption of language to the local market where the original context and meaning is preserved and conveyed keeping in view the local culture.

Localisation takes into account culture, idioms and phrases specific to the target language so that the meaning is conveyed in right, not offensive manner.

From the above localisation definition, we can easily infer its relation to the business. Simply put, what does localisation mean also has to do with what it does for a business. Businesses have content written in one language, written keeping in view a specific target audience and their cultural context. 

You now need to translate and localise your content and make it fit for consumption in another market, linguistically and culturally different from one it was originally written for.

Here, translation alone won’t help. For instance, it is raining cats and dogs is perfectly understood by English speakers as meaning it is heavily raining, not cats and dogs are falling from the sky.

You cannot translate the above expression word for word as it would confuse your target audience who could take the meaning of the words “cats” and “dogs” literally because of unfamiliarity with it.

To overcome such linguistic traps, localisation comes to the business’s rescue and looks for expressions equivalent to the one quoted above in the target language itself so that the originality of the message is preserved, so is its intended meaning.

Localisation in Global Economy

Even in a globalized economy, local languages, traditions, cultures have not lost their appeal. Local consumers seek and care for them, so should businesses. 

The more targeted your marketing message better it resonates with your audience. Localization gives your message a particularly local connection and vibe, making it instantly accessible and attractive. Consequently, it builds trust and localises your brand.

Why Content Localisation?

Potential consumers connect better with brands if it is in their language. Website localization can expand your business’s reach and build lasting relationships with your audience.

Leave alone machine translation, even manual translation doesn’t stand a chance without localisation to make translations accurate and effective. This is because culture-specific nuances of language are hard to incorporate into translation work in absence of content localisation.

Only an astute linguist can help you come up with taglines, slogans, and other advertising material that truly reflects local flavour.  Or has been localized.

Localisation Marketing

That takes us to localisation in marketing, a process that has the potential to increase conversion rate exponentially. It’s much easier to impress your target audience if talked to in their language. 

With localised marketing, you hook audiences’ attention instantaneously because they won’t have to process and squeeze meaning out of your message. With localisation, meanings come easy!

Choosing Localisation Agency for Localisation Services

Partnering with linguists who have your target language as their mother tongue can take your marketing to the next level. And localisation agencies house expert linguists who make it happen.

At Locate Translate, a multilingual translation agency, offering high-quality translation and localisation service in over 30 languages, we’ve linguists who’ve expert knowledge of the culture, language, mindset of your target audience.

As a result, the services offered by us offer you accurate translations and your audience, a thoroughly localized experience. 

Avoid Language Translation Tools

Owning a business means you’re involved in a formal relationship with your audience. Your accuracy builds your brand image and cements trust. You don’t want to lose that? 

Still, relying on language translation tools may likely force you out of favour, especially when entering a new marketplace. Automated language translation is replete with mistakes, inaccuracies and doesn’t include localisation. Much of it you cannot share with your target audience because it is of so low quality.

Only certified translators can help you convey your message accurately and effectively, without losing its context. And language translation tools don’t understand idioms the way we understand them. 

To put it in simple words, if you’re serving, for example, in a market where the local language is Malayalam. You cannot go to a Translation Tool like Google Translation API for translation English to Malayalam. 

You’re serving 38 million people when targeting the language market in Malayalam. And your English to Malayalam translation needs can’t just be left for the translation language app to handle. You’re not just missing accuracy but context, intended meaning, and, of course, localisation.

Give your Business a Truly International Presence with Translation and Localization

To reap the benefits of the global market, what you’ve to do is get your website translated right now. Pandemic has taught us our reliance on the online marketplace, cutting across borders, is only going to increase when crises like the COVID-19 pandemic make stepping out near impossible.

On the internet, you have a genuinely global audience interacting with your business day in day out. By giving them the language they understand, you’re in for a rollercoaster ride. For that website translation service is your stepping stone and you can’t climb without taking this necessary first step.

You also need a localisation strategy that drives sales, or yields results. Combining it with transcription services make a magic recipe that can take your business higher. Incorporate these into your digital marketing strategy to expand your business, earn more profit and save money that would go into creating new content for a new market, as translation gets old content translated at a lower cost.

For anyone wanting to capitalize on the global market, it can’t be done without prioritizing translation, localisation, and transcription. Businesses have to make all these services integral to their daily operations. 

While translating your content, maximum care should go to the quality, accuracy, and consistency of the translation, not quantity. It can be achieved only by partnering with a translation agency like Locate Translate.

Want us to do translation work for your business? We’re Locate Translate, a sophisticated translation agency in the UK, providing top-notch translation and localisation services. Our translators provide content that can be used on multiple platforms, linguistically and culturally diverse. Drop us a message at hello@locatetranslate.co.uk or visit our website.

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