Make Your Product Attractive Abroad with Software UI Localization

What Software UI Localization Can Do for a Growing Company

When a company’s product is a piece of software, taking it to market in a new country requires a unique set of skills, including software UI localization. Whether it’s the system that runs restaurant point of sale networks or a digital recording suite to let new musicians publish their work easily on the internet, getting every detail of the user interface right is essential.

The translated product must embody the same effective design components that made the product successful in its original language while also being adapted to the linguistic, cultural, and technical requirements of users in the target market. This requires localization services from a localization project management team with a unique overlap of cultural and linguistic fluency with software design. For software to be used in dynamic fields, the value of an expert software UI localization firm is even greater, because they can be instrumental in maintaining technical language and keeping new updates and components of the software accurate and up to date.

The process of applying localization services to software to get the user interface ready for new markets always involves several phases. It begins with assessment of goals, tasks, and resources, continuing to pseudo-localizing, testing, and implementation of the full set of localization changes. Then come different levels of quality assurance, linguistic and cultural accuracy tests, and finally the launch. Because of the specific knowledge of the market needed at each step, as well as the importance of leveraging a firm’s own skills and particularly IT resources, software UI localization is very labor intensive.

Managing all the steps and keeping the different components of the localization on schedule and paced with one another means that on top of specialized localization knowledge and software design capacity, the software localization firm must also bring strong project management skills to the process, or rely on the PMO at the firm.

In either case, taking software to market in a new country can be a very effective growth strategy, but doing so successfully without the help of a specialized localization firm can be prohibitively difficult. Please contact us for more information; we are available by phone at 425.284.7800, or email us at adainfo@adaquest.com.