A company with premises in Boston and Nottingham is bringing business home by translating web sites into a range of languages and ‘localising’ them too.
PAB Language Centres operates globally, and in the last quarter completed 11 website translations and localisations for clients, including into French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Swedish, and Japanese.
Iwona Lebiedowicz, founder of PAB Languages Centre Ltd, said: “A multilingual website engages new audiences and opens the opportunity to become visible across international search engines. A properly localised website speaks directly to the consumer in their own language, enabling businesses and brands to compete with local and global players in their niche.
“Localisation is a comprehensive process that entails not only text translation but also other factors to bear in mind. These include modifying your content to respect local market habits, addressing economic, historical, and sometimes political references, adjusting images, icons, and colours to local tastes and culture, changing dates, addresses, phone numbers, and other details to fit a local format, and converting to local currencies and units of measure.
“The numbers are quite staggering – translating your website into English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese and Italian enables you to reach 80% of the global online purchasing power – so it’s no surprise that an increasing number of businesses are looking to translate and localise their websites.”
It has UK offices in the East Midlands as well as Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire, and Essex. PAB works locally and internationally with clients from the UK and around the world.
“Localisation is a complex process and one that requires a huge range of skills and specialist knowledge. For these reasons, the process of localising a website is best handled by a team of professionals,” added Iwona.
Around 40% of internet users said they will never buy from websites that are not in their native language and 65% of non-native English speakers prefer content in their native tongue, even though they are highly proficient in English, according to CSA Research.
And in a 2022 study by PayPal, 57% of online shoppers said that they shopped internationally. In fact, two out of five global shoppers had made a cross-border purchase in the previous three months.
