Want to bring your applications into the Chinese market? Check SSW's Chinafy consulting page.
The companies that succeed globally (Spotify, Netflix, Uber) don’t just translate. They design from day one for cultural, linguistic, and technical differences.
You need to consider both technical and marketing factors. Amazon's Swedish website accidentally replaced "rooster" with the Swedish word for male genitals. An Italian company named their international site powergenitalia.com instead of powergen-italia.com back in 2003. These were more than bad translations. They revealed big marketing mistakes.
China is a booming market and now is the time to take advantage of this growing user base. If you have a successful application you should bring it to the Chinese market.
Most Chinese consumers will not make a purchase or use your application if information is not easily available in Chinese.
Localization makes your web application ready to work more than one language — and it’s much easier if you do it from the beginning. Just follow these tips to better localize your application for a specific country or region.
If you are localizing your web application to make it available in a varitety of languages, it's better to set your application default language to automatically change to local language. E.g. Make the web application default language as same as the browser language.
Localization because absolutely needed when your application has to be shown to people in many countries. To make your application more friendly, it's very important to always give the user a option to change the locale (e.g. by adding locale dropdown menu on page) and remember this choice for the future visits. e.g. To change the language for your application, you can simply choose the new language from the language dropdown.
With the increasing use of JavaScript on the client and HTML5, client-side localization is fast becoming a necessity for displaying messages, text, and resources localized for the user's culture. You can use client-side tools for localization as much as possible so that for the most part, the back end of your service remains unchanged. e.g. If you are using AngularJS, then use the Angular Translate plugin.
Knowing the context and use of certain strings will help translators choose the right translation from the beginning when you localize your web application to make it available in a variety of languages. Most translation tools will allow translators to see these comments as they translate the strings. To make your comments more friendly, it's better to list in the comment field where this text is used. e.g.
Modern websites can use 3rd party dependencies from many different sources. This can include js and CSS libraries from CDNs, video providers such as YouTube and other 3rd party APIs.
Some countries (especially China) strictly control access to various international web services. Meanwhile, as geopolitical tensions escalate, many service providers are actively restricting or blocking access to their services in specific regions like China, including Copilot, ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Claude, etc. You can use service detection to determine whether particular services are available, allowing you to fallback gracefully or use alternative providers.
To keep profile management simple and make it easier for users to have a consistent experience across applications, you should use Gravatar for showing profile images in your application.
If your site takes too long to load, there is a high chance your users will not wait for it to finish loading and abandon viewing it. It is therefore important that we use techniques to make pages load as quickly as possible. One of these techniques is to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to reduce the network latency for delivering pages, images, javascript and CSS libraries to users. This results in faster page load times and a better experience for your users.
Whether you’re rebranding, migrating your website to a new technology stack, or simply retiring old content, understanding when and how to implement redirects is crucial to preserve your SEO and avoid potential 404 errors.
There are several ways of implementing multilingual support in an Angular project, the following libraries are popular:
Internationalization (i18n): the standard Angular built-in module to help the application dealing with multilingual. It creates multiple language versions of your application.
ngx-translate: a library enhanced the Angular built-in feature, it supports not only template translations but can also be used in the code by APIs.
In every successful team or project, it is crucial to track meaningful progress rather than relying solely on gut feelings. Clear metrics transform vague opinions into data-driven insights. This approach leads to better decisions, more objective performance reviews, and continuous improvement over time.
When a client raises concerns about performance, it is important not to immediately dive into the code to make blind fixes. Instead of guessing what might help, we should approach the issue methodically by starting with clear benchmarks, profiling, and data-driven decisions.
Gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. Gzip can reduce file size and storage space, and reduce transmission time when transferring files over the network. It runs on both Linux and Windows.
If you are localizing your application to China, some of the English words are commonly used in China. Instead of translating a word to Chinese bluntly, you should keep them in English.
You should pick a Chinese name for your app or product when going to China market. Here is how you should chose it:
Promoting your application and business via social media can be extremely beneficial, not only for promoting a business but for feedback from customers as well. To help implement social media campaigns, try these tips:
The biggest mistake most western companies make when embarking on a business journey in China, is assuming that their current Social Media strategies will work over there.
China is different. There are different rules, platforms and of course, they have a government controlled firewall that blocks many western platforms your are familiar with, like Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. *Uh oh*. That's right - none of the platforms you currently use everyday now work in China, you need a new plan.
If you have an office in more than one country, a great way to show your diversity and connect with your different audiences is through posting multilingual social media.
Building and maintaining a multilingual social media presence is not an easy undertaking, but when done properly it is well worth the time and effort. It allows you to truly connect with your audience regardless of which language they speak. International customers will appreciate the fact that your brand has taken time to communicate with them in their native tongue, it will also help establish their trust in your ability to understand them, and shows that you don't have to rely on dodgy automatic translations that often go wrong.