Your brand name should never be misspelled

Your brand name is your most important asset. It may have a specific capitalization (yourBrand, YourBRAND, YourBrand, yourbrand, YOURBRAND) or a symbol that must always appear next to it (yourBrand™). Whichever the case, it should be consistently written in all your assets: website, app, product pages, support pages, flyers, marketing emails, etc. And that also covers all your translations. Brand name localization Misspelling brand names, specially when they are long or have tricky capitalizations or combinations of letters, is most common than you may think. And it does not make you look good: It shows lack of attention, care or…
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Localizing times

Localizing times might seam easy: “5:30 PM” in Spanish and Galician is “17:30”. Done. Publish. However, time localization involves much more than just changing the time format. How time works in Galicia and Spain If a Galician or Spanish user opens an app at 5:30 PM, when most people are still working, and the app says “Boas noites” or “Buenas noches” (which means “Good night”), the user will probably be puzzled. This is why localization is so important, because in Galicia (and Spain) we only say that when we are finishing the day, which could start at any time between…
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User experience in localized websites and apps

A good localization will deliver your target market at least the same user experience your source market users enjoy. Otherwise, you will be confirming that you have first-class and second-class users. And nobody likes to be considered second-class, especially if they are spending money on your business. Spanish users Shouldn’t have to search for “España” or “español” in the letter “S”.Shouldn’t have to see dates in Spanish wrongly ordered or with missing prepositions.Shouldn’t have to see the prices for the USA instead of the prices for Spain.Shouldn’t have to see a monolingual Spanish glossary of terms randomly ordered because it…
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Women do exist, we are not a myth

The fact Women don’t like to be addressed in masculine. That shouldn't be a surprise, but it happens a lot. More frequently than you may think. That's mainly because English is a non-gendered language, but Galician, Spanish and many more languages are gendered.Addressing all of your audience in masculine is excluding all your female audience. It's showing them that they don’t matter to you, that they aren’t really part of your target audience. If you don’t bother addressing them correctly, why should they bother buying your products or services? The solution For signed-in users, adapting the translation based on their…
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Links in Markdown syntax and how to localize them

Localization matters Let me start with something you will hear a lot from me: Localization is much more than just translating. It is not a fancy word, it is simply more than just translating. When localizing websites, you need to know the language or syntax used (HTML, Markdown, etc.) in order to correctly localize different elements, such as links, snippets, formatting tags, and so on. Links in Markdown syntax An error I see quite often is the incorrect localization of links written in Markdown syntax, which look like this:This is a sentence [with a hyperlinked text](URL the link directs to).This…
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