What does a typical localization program rollout look like? Every customer is different, but in general, the timeline will go something like this. Most companies will have some or all of the following assets that need to be localized.
Many companies start off by localizing their product. This is the logical place to start because it doesn’t really make sense to localize other assets, draw users in, and then drop them into an English only experience. The volume of material that needs to be translated is also lower, so this can be done on an experimental basis.
If you already know you are going to launch languages, you might as well translate most of these other assets in parallel. Language service providers generally have the bandwidth to handle large backlogs, so that’s not a blocker to working in parallel. What we generally recommend is that companies start off with Spanish for the US Latino market (in the case of US companies). This is a good way to get your tooling and process automation sorted out, and to decouple adding language support from regional expansion. The Spanish speaking market in the US is significant, so you can score a short term win while building the foundational work for global operation.
Spanish As A Prelude To International Expansion
Most companies will have a decent amount of technical work that needs to be done to support localization and internationalization. The activities in this stage of development will include the following items
If you are lucky and have followed internationalization best practices, and you chose a CMS like Drupal or Contentful, this will all be pretty straightforward. Most companies can expect to spend 3 to 6 months on this, more if there is a lot of tech debt to deal with, less if things are in decent shape to begin with. If you haven’t already be sure to read this primer on best practices.