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Does your company sell products & services in Latin America? If so, there is a 60% higher chance that you will be able to sell more if your website is correctly localized for the Latin American market.
We have listed below the 5 important factors that must be taken into consideration when you’re localizing your website for Latin America!
1. CORRECT VARIATION OF SPANISH:
Take into account that each LA country has its specific lexical variations of Spanish. If you’re not localizing for a specific country then the selected terminology, style, and tone should be as broad and as neutral as possible. Make sure their meaning is the intended one.
2. CAPITALIZATION RULES:
Capitalization is different in Spanish than it is in English. It’s quite common that lot of Spanish websites incorrectly follow the English rule of capitalization. In Spanish, only the initial letter of a title is capitalized. Correct use of capitalization can really improve the first impression of your Spanish website as titles are supposed to be real attention catchers in the Spanish speaking psyche. Also, months of the year, days of the week, languages and nationalities do not need to be capitalized in Spanish.
For example:
Source title: “Export and Distribution”
Wrong translation: “Exportación y Distribución”
Correct translation: “Exportación y distribución”
3. FIGURES and DATES:
In the USA, our measurements are based on the imperial system. In Latin America, metric system is the standard!
Therefore, all of your measurements/dimensions should be converted to the metric system on your Spanish website. This is specifically important for websites that contain technical specifications of the products they are promoting in Latin America. If your measurements/dimensions are not correctly localized, you’re either asking your target audience to convert it on their own or that you don’t care for their standard! Be warned, this will not go down well for your company’s brand in Latin America!
It is generally a best practice to just display the converted measurement or you can keep the original one plus the localized measurement in brackets.
For example:
Source text: Length: 32.03 inches; Width: 17.10 inches; Height: 19.85 inches
Incorrect localization: Largo: 32,03 pulgadas; Ancho: 17,10 pulgadas, Alto: 19,85 pulgadas
Correct localization: Largo: 32,03 pulgadas (81 centímetros); Ancho: 17,10 pulgadas (43 centímetros); Alto: 19,85 pulgadas (50 centímetros)
4. HOW and WHAT:
In Spanish, how you convey your message is probably more important than what the message actually is! That being said, Spanish sentences are longer and the narrative style tends to be more elaborate. Another important note; exclamation marks are used much more often in English than they are in Spanish. The overuse of exclamation marks in your Spanish content may make your site look overemphatic.
5. THE SYMBOL CALLED TILDE:
Unfortunately, it’s very common to find words like “CONTACTENOS” instead of “CONTÁCTENOS”. It goes without saying that if your Spanish website is missing the tilde symbols then you’re really not connecting with your target audience at various different levels!
All in all, website localization workflow is different than a normal document translation workflow. If your Spanish website is not yielding the desired results then it might be time to get it revamped!
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