English is no longer the ruling language on the web.

The number of web surfers has risen dramatically in the last few years, and most of them speak a mother tongue other than English. Why then make do with a website in English if your main target audience speaks, say, Spanish?

Your website is your online business card in the global world and it could be a decisive factor behind a potential customer's decision whether to use your services or products.

Moreover, it is a known fact that web surfers more readily frequent, and tend to buy more on websites that speak their language.

A professionally translated website will convey the message you want to convey to your customers accurately and eloquently, by adapting it to the local culture both content-wise and visually. Such a website will make it possible for you to reach web surfers worldwide in their own language.

The benefits of website localization:

• Breaking the language barrier: English is not the only language on the web – it is just one of several. French, Arabic, Spanish and Chinese are only some of the languages that hundreds of millions of people use to surf the web. As more companies approach their customers in their own language, it will be more difficult for you to penetrate that market in the future – unless you make sure to localize in time.
• Building trust and establishing an international reputation: The question is simple: if your website is in English only, whereas a competing website is in the local language as well, which one of them is likelier to win the trust of local customers? A professionally translated website shows that your company is a key player on the international market and that it understands and values the local target market.
• Increasing revenues: It is difficult to assess the tremendous loss, in terms of unrealized potential revenue, resulting from a website that is not accessible enough to customers. Moreover, extensive research has shown that web surfers tend to make more purchases from websites written in their own language. Localizing your website will grant you access to millions of new potential clients and increase the purchase volume among website visitors.

Website localization includes, inter alia, the following:

• Studying the site's subject matter with the competition in mind, and building a suitable glossary of terms in each language
• Translating and editing the content
• Translating and building the website's graphics files, including Flash files
• Performing content and functional QA until the site goes live

Beyond the translation of the website content, the localization process also takes into account the cultural and regulatory aspects in the target country.

Our team of professionals makes sure to convert or adapt all the elements involved – such as currency, date and number formats, icons, colors and pictures – to the culture and regulation of the target countries.

At Hever Localization, we make sure to see you through the considerable process of adapting your website to the global market.

You can send us the material requiring translation in any format (HTML, XML, PHP, etc.), and we will help you to ascertain whether the website design enables you to display all the relevant languages.

Using technological tools, we can isolate the content to be translated from the source code, thereby keeping the code intact.

Our consultants, along with the translators and culture experts in the various countries, will help you to convey your message in tune with the local culture.

We give our full attention both to the website's appearance – the user interface (UI), graphic design, colors and pictures – and to the optimal way of conveying your message, in accordance with the target countries and the potential customer audience.

Because we are aware of the power of words and the fact that language is a living, evolving entity, we employ professional translators who not only have a thorough grasp of the language and its modern-day usage, but are also familiar with the diverse cultural nuances of the source and target languages. They preserve the spirit of the original and the clarity of the message while using the newest concepts and most up-to-date and pertinent terminology.

Our translators are assigned to different professional "desks", according to their fields of expertise; thus, each one only translates material within his realm of education and experience, and into his mother tongue.

As a website is a marketing tool, once it is translated, it undergoes linguistic and marketing review by a marketing editor who resides in the target country and whose mother tongue is the target language. The editor's job is to make sure that the message was clearly conveyed and locally adapted, so that the translation becomes "transparent" and the reader in the target country feels as if the website were written in his own language.