Localisation is the work of adapting a product, website or piece of content so that it fits the market it is going into — not only its language, but its conventions, formats, expectations and law. Translation changes the words. Localisation changes everything around the words that would otherwise mark the content as foreign.
The distinction sounds academic until you watch it fail. A hotel booking form that demands a two-line address breaks in Japan. A winter campaign built on snow and fir trees reads as nonsense in Singapore in December. A price shown as “$1,200” is ambiguous in four countries at once. None of those is a translation error. All of them are localisation errors, and all of them cost bookings.
This piece defines localisation, separates it from translation and transcreation, sets out what actually gets localised, and shows what the work looks like on a real multilingual programme.
Key Takeaways
- Translation handles the words; localisation handles everything else that has to change — formats, imagery, structure, payment and address conventions, legal notices and navigation.
- Transcreation is the third discipline, and it applies to the content whose job is persuasion. It rewrites rather than converts, because a line that has been translated accurately can still fail to sell.
- Most real projects need all three on different parts of the same website, which is why the first task is sorting the content, not starting the translating.
What localisation means
Localisation asks a different question from translation: not “what does this say?” but “would a local reader believe this was made for them?”
The word comes from software, where shipping a product into a new market meant changing far more than its interface text — date formats, character sets, sort orders, keyboard input, text direction, the space a button needs when the label gets longer. Marketing inherited the term and the problem. A brand’s website is a product too, and it fails in the same ways.
The giveaways of unlocalised content are rarely linguistic. They are a date written 03/04 and read as the wrong day; a form that insists on a postcode in a country that does not use them; a seasonal campaign aligned to the wrong hemisphere; a photograph of a family that does not look like the audience; a currency symbol with no country attached; a phone number with no international prefix. Each one tells the reader this page was made for somebody else.
A note on spelling: “localisation” and “localization” are the same word — British and American conventions respectively. The industry also abbreviates it to l10n, the first and last letters with the ten in between. We use the British spelling throughout.
Localisation, translation and transcreation
These are three different jobs, and the expensive mistake is buying one when you needed another.
| Translation | Localisation | Transcreation | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What changes | The words | The words plus formats, imagery, structure and conventions | The message, rebuilt to work on a new audience |
| The question it answers | What does this say? | Does this fit this market? | Does this still persuade? |
| Latitude | Stay close to the source | Change whatever the market requires | Depart from the source where staying close would weaken it |
| Judged on | Accuracy and completeness | Whether anything marks the content as foreign | Whether it works in-market |
| Right for | Policies, terms, allergen and safety notices, operational text | Websites, apps, booking flows, forms, the whole surface | Homepages, campaign lines, destination and suite copy, menus |
| Typical failure | A mistranslation | Correct text in a page that still feels imported | Copy that is accurate and flat |
We define transcreation as “creative translation”, a process that adapts the emotional expressions and contextual relevance of the source message that goes beyond literal meaning of words. Four things have to arrive together for it to work: language, emotion, culture and your brand’s tone of voice.
The three disciplines are not a quality ladder. They are different tools, and a cancellation policy transcreated into something lyrical is as wrong as a tagline translated word for word.
The relationship is nested rather than parallel. Localising a website necessarily involves translating its operational text and, on the pages that have to sell, transcreating its marketing copy. A brand that commissions “localisation” and receives only translated strings has not been given what it asked for. The longer treatment of the middle distinction is in transcreation and translation in hospitality.
What actually gets localised
Sort the content before you price it. On a hotel or travel website the inventory usually falls into five groups, and each group needs a different treatment.
1. Interface and navigation
Menu labels, buttons, form fields, error messages, confirmation screens. These have to be short, unambiguous and conventional — and they are where text expansion bites, because a label that fits an English button can overflow the same button in German.
2. Formats and conventions
Dates, times, numbers, currencies, units, address formats, postcodes, telephone formats, name order, honorifics, paper sizes for anything printed. This is the most mechanical part of localisation and the most frequently skipped.
3. Operational and legal content
Rates, policies, cancellation terms, accessibility and safety information, allergen notices, privacy text. This has to be accurate, plain and locally compliant. It should not be creatively adapted.
4. Marketing and brand content
The homepage, destination and property descriptions, suite and room copy, campaign lines, eDMs, brochures, menus, press releases. This is the content that has to make someone want the thing, and it is the content that transcreation exists for.
5. Non-text assets
Photography, video, subtitles, voice-over, icons, colour, and the cultural assumptions inside them. Seasons invert across the equator. Imagery that signals luxury in one market signals something else in another. Colour carries meaning that varies by market — red reads as celebration and good fortune across much of Asia and as warning or passion elsewhere.
Each surface then has to be returned in a usable form: published into a content management system or booking engine, built into app strings, or finalised as print-ready artwork. Content that arrives as a document someone has to re-key is not finished.
Website localisation and search
A localised site has to be findable in the new market, and translated keywords are not local keywords.
People in different markets search for the same thing using different words, different phrase lengths and sometimes different platforms. Translating an English keyword list gives you the English concept in another language, which is not the same as what local travellers actually type. The research has to be done in the target language and the findings built into the copy as it is written, rather than retrofitted afterwards. That is how we handle multilingual SEO: final localised keywords are incorporated into the transcreation process itself.
The technical side belongs to the same job — hreflang signalling so search engines serve the right language version, localised page titles, meta descriptions, URLs and image alt text, and a page that loads quickly on the devices the market actually uses.
An example: ten languages, one brochure programme
What localisation looks like when it is done properly is mostly unglamorous: sorting, terminology, proofing and reuse.
Gardens by the Bay, the Singapore attraction, came to us through a public tender that included trials in ten regional languages. We won a two-year contract as a preferred vendor and produced its marketing and media brochures in 10 languages.
The language work was only part of it. Because the output was print, we proofed the client’s artwork files in each language rather than returning text and hoping it fitted — the stage at which multilingual print usually fails, since a line that is 30 per cent longer does not fit the panel it was designed for. Across the programme we reused the Translation Memory built for the client, so the terminology for the attraction’s zones, plants and ticket types stayed identical from one brochure to the next and repeat content did not have to be paid for twice.
Two further engagements show the same pattern on different surfaces. For COMO Hotels & Resorts we localised website content into 7 languages — Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Russian and Spanish — publishing into the Drupal back end alongside the client’s digital agency, and extended the same programme to CRM content, in-room directories, spa and F&B menus and press releases. For FWD, the Omne app was localised into 7 Asian languages, integrated into the app’s content management system and checked linguistically so that every market could launch simultaneously across APAC.
How the work runs
Localisation is sequential, and the order matters more than the speed. Ours runs in six steps:
- Understand the Project Brief. The content inventory, the markets, the purpose, the constraints.
- Pre-Transcreation Study. Brand materials, style and tone, and the market-specific technical jargon and colloquial terms the content will need.
- Transcreation. The writing, drawing on the Translation Memory built for the brand.
- Client Review. The brand’s own market teams read it before anyone publishes.
- Update and Approval. Revisions, then sign-off.
- Final Delivery. Into the system it has to live in, or as artwork ready to print.
The step brands are tempted to drop is the second one. It is the step that decides whether the vocabulary is settled before forty pages are written in it, or argued about afterwards across eleven languages at once.
Conclusion
Localisation is the broad discipline: making content belong in a market. Translation is one component of it, appropriate where accuracy is the whole requirement. Transcreation is the component that applies where the content has to persuade, and it is the one most often bought as translation and then wondered about.
The practical consequence is that the first deliverable on any multilingual programme is not translated text. It is a sorted content inventory, with each item marked for the treatment it needs. Get that wrong and you will either overpay for policy pages or underfund the homepage — and the second mistake is the expensive one, because flat marketing copy is paid for twice: once to produce, and again to replace.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is localisation in simple terms?
What is the difference between translation and localisation?
Is localisation the same as transcreation?
Localisation or localization — which spelling is right?
What gets localised on a hotel website?
How long does website localisation take?
Does localisation get cheaper over time?
If you are scoping a localisation programme, send us the content inventory and the market list and we will mark up which items need rendering and which need rewriting. More on the disciplines themselves is on our transcreation, website localisation and marketing localisation pages, the category on marketing translation, and the vocabulary in our glossary. If you are choosing a supplier, start with what a language service provider is.