By internationalizing your products, you can gain a number of significant benefits in terms of localization time and costs when you decide to, say, translate your software strings into French or any other language. Always plan globally to make the most out of your international initiatives.
1. Increase revenue and profit potential
World-ready software is accessible to more users around the world because it can support many more languages beside English. As a result, a world-ready application can be sold in more places thus potentially increasing your revenue and profits.
2. Reduce international development costs
Time is money, but time saved by not producing a world-ready product is short-sighted. If you think about international users’ needs up front and incorporate them into your original designs, you will not have to go back later and fix design issues to enable globalization or localization or create multiple localized source codes for your product.
3. Get more miles out of your code
A single code base that supports users worldwide is much more efficient and cost-effective to develop and manage than a product with multiple code bases. With a single code base, it is much easier and less error-prone to update the product. As a result, code quality improves. This allows for greater code reuse and can serve as the foundation for the next version of the product.
4. Cheaper and easier to localize
With world-ready software, localization is streamlined. All the files you need to hand off to your localization team or vendor are separated from the code meaning less opportunity to introduce functionality errors in the code.
5. Easier to customize to meet customer preferences
If you want to take a product to a new level of user experience and excitement, consider market customization. With market customization, you enable your product so it is easier to modify its look, feel and behavior. The product appears to the customer as if it was designed for their specific market.
6. Lower testing costs
Testing localized products based on a single code base that has been designed for international markets reduces the duplication of functional testing prevalent in localized products based on different code bases.
7. Empower any user, anywhere, anytime
A world-ready product that supports many languages provides a common platform for communication and collaboration across the Intranet and the Internet for any user, anywhere and in any language. By shipping a world-ready solution, your customer in India can ensure easy data exchange with the colleagues in China.
8. Lower support costs
A product based on a single code base can simplify software distribution and deployment, plus it can lead to shipping a single service pack that can be installed on any language version of the application.
9. Increase customer satisfaction
Proper globalization and localizability during the planning and design phases can reduce localization-related delays and help you reach international customers sooner. Products that are localized reduce the learning curve for your customers/users thus enhancing their experience and increasing their satisfaction.
10. Move ahead of the competition
A product that is world-ready allows your company to enter markets more quickly and easily because it already supports foreign languages and is primed for quick turnaround in localization. Your company and product becomes more agile in seizing emerging opportunities. Furthermore, by using the savings realized from efficient development and reduced localization and testing costs, you can gain even greater advantage over your competition by expanding the language footprint of your product(s). As a result, you can reach more customers with products in their language.