Insights

How do they relate to the localisation industry?

Nowadays, more and more companies are concerned about the worldwide changes as they can be affected by macroeconomic aspects. According to PIIE (Peterson Institute for International Economics), the term “globalisation” is defined as “the growing interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures, and populations, brought about by cross-border trade in goods and services, technology, and flows of investment, people, and information.”

However, lately this term has been linked to business concerns as for so many companies, it can imply the expansion of their present portfolio. In business, they refer to globalisation as the batch of processes that a firm operates to bring their businesses presence to the rest of the world. But, how can they do it?

From the business general point of view, the globalisation process must be prepared beforehand in order to ensure the success of their operations abroad. It is not an easy step to take, but it is a very important one for the growth of the business. For that reason, all the companies that want to start operating abroad should first follow two stages: internationalisation and localisation.

Internationalisation stage

For this step of the globalisation process, the company must adapt internally itself for the incoming strategies that it is going to face. The internationalisation stage involves the corporate strategy that businesses apply to adapt the current portfolio of goods and services to the new markets or diversify its portfolio to facilitate the expansion into international markets. The right internal processes need to be adopted to ease the internationalisation effort.

Localisation stage

The localisation stage is similar to the internationalisation stage due to the fact that if you want to expand to international markets, you do have to adapt the products or services you are offering to the cultural and idiosyncratic characteristics of the market you want to penetrate. Basically, you need to adapt your products, solutions or services to the local markets.

Why is it so important to make a comparison and a differentiation among these trending terms? This accounts for the key role of the localisation and translation industry in the globalisation process. Understanding the needs of the stakeholders of your company is indeed vital to make sure your globalisation strategy will be successful, and that is the most important point. However, any company has the potential to adapt to the cultural characteristics of local markets with the help of localisation specialists.

In conclusion, as the companies are expanding more and more into multiple countries, they require the services from localisation firms to enable and improve the communication efficiency with all their stakeholders to engage them. As a result, this industry has been blooming for the past decades and this trend has been confirmed up to now.