Translation ensures people understand your content language-wise, while localization ensures the content evokes the intended idea and emotions.
Translation
The act of translation is converting content from one language to another while keeping the exact meaning of the original.However, keeping the same meaning doesn’t necessarily mean conveying the same message. Take idioms and colloquialisms. In English, when you say something’s a piece of cake, you mean it’s easy. That’s an idiom. You’re not really talking about sweet pastry, are you? When you translate such an idiom word-by-word to other languages, it sounds weird, at best. Most likely, native speakers won’t know what you meant at all.
Localization
Localization comes into play when you need to transform idiomatic expressions into another language to make them comprehensible to the local audience. Localization is a lot more complex than “simple” translation. When you localize content, you not only translate it, but you also take care of the idioms and other cultural aspects. A result of good localization sounds natural and makes sense to the target audience. If original English content uses a US political reference that makes people chuckle, a Japanese audience probably wouldn’t appreciate the joke. Localization means finding a similar reference that’ll evoke the same feeling in the target audience as did the source reference evoke in the original audience.
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Localization and translation are two very different yet interconnected ways of adjusting the content for your local audience.
Content item variants are a versatile way to adjust content for different languages, regions, or both.
When localizing content, you need to convert idiomatic phrases and colloquialisms to the target language while keeping the original text’s sense, voice, and tone.
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