Cultural Adaptation
Customs, beliefs, laws, styles, grammar, and idioms are unique to each country. Even within a single country, there can be a wide variety of linguistic and cultural nuances. Adapting these cultural components is as important as language translation itself.
What Is Cultural Adaptation?
At a basic level, adaptation means the translation of all visible text strings, dialog boxes, menus, on-line help, etc., as well as user documentation and promotional and packaging material into a foreign language. It further involves adjusting the size of the interface to accommodate language expansion.
At a more detailed level, Cultural Adaptation means adapting your product to a certain country, region, or locale. It takes into account the cultural context of the location where you want to sell your product and helps ensure that the target audience can relate to the content on all levels, not only in their language, but also within their cultural conventions.
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Many conventions we take for granted vary greatly from one country to another, in particular:
- Measurement systems and units
- Capitalization and punctuation rules
- Date and time format
- Currency
In some cases, Cultural Adaptation may also involve adapting content to local laws and regulations. For example, training material containing culture-specific protocols often needs substantial rewriting to make it conform to the locale where it will be used.
Cultural Adaptation does not begin and end with language translation.
To achieve acceptance in a target market, adapting content and complying with regulatory requirements and laws are as important as translating the language itself. Correct localization often results in an enormous competitive advantage, and this translates into higher revenues and higher profit.
Omni’s Cultural Adaptation process customizes content, engineering terms, product descriptions, legal documents, and user manuals to local markets by applying the appropriate cultural and linguistic customs. Your audience will never suspect that your materials were converted from another language. Our comprehensive process ensures that your collateral not only functions like the original, but looks and feels as if it was originally created in the country where it will be used. This approach is a significant reason why our customer retention rates are exceptional and why so many clients continue to refer our services.
Enbridge Inc.
“Thanks again for the fabulous turnaround on our brochures a few weeks ago; your work was incredibly helpful.”