Localisation strategy Archives - sa��ʴ�ý

What impact has localisation had on your company? Here’s what our clients said

Emma Belanger — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:26:35 +0000

Every year, we check in with our active clients to understand how localisation is working for them and where we can do more. This year, we asked a simple but revealing question: what impact has localisation had on your company? The responses from clients across a range of industries painted a clear picture. Nine out of ten reported a tangible, positive impact on their business.

Here’s what they told us, and what it means in practice.

Localisation as a growth engine

When we combined the responses around reaching new markets (14%), increasing sales or revenue (14%) and reducing time-to-market for products and services (14%), 42% of respondents pointed to localisation as a direct driver of business expansion. That’s a significant proportion, and it reflects a shift in how many organisations are coming to think about multilingual content as a growth enabler.

The connection between localisation and market entry is well established. Consumers are significantly more likely to purchase from a website in their own language and more likely to return. But the link to revenue goes deeper than language preference alone. When your content is culturally adapted – when it reflects local norms, addresses local concerns and uses familiar frames of reference – it builds the kind of trust that converts browsers into buyers and first-time customers into loyal ones.

Time-to-market is a less obvious but equally important factor. For businesses launching products or services across multiple regions simultaneously, localisation bottlenecks can delay releases, create inconsistencies between markets and erode competitive advantage. Organisations that integrate localisation early into their development and content workflows consistently find that multilingual content supports rather than slows their launch timelines.

Customer experience and brand: the largest impact area

The biggest single response category was improved customer experience and satisfaction, cited by 27% of respondents. A further 18% said localisation had strengthened their brand globally, making this the combined area where clients felt the most impact overall, at 45%.

It’s worth unpacking why customer experience ranked so highly. Localisation affects every touchpoint a customer has with your brand: your website, your product interface, your support documentation, your marketing communications. When each of these speaks to someone in their own language and cultural context, the cumulative effect is a sense that your brand understands them. That feeling of being understood is one of the most powerful drivers of customer satisfaction and retention.

Brand strength operates on a similar principle, but over a longer horizon. A globally consistent brand that adapts intelligently to local contexts, rather than simply translating its English-language messaging word for word, earns credibility in each market it enters. Inconsistent framing and representation in localised materials and local presence, on the other hand, can quietly undermine the impression of professionalism that global companies work hard to build in their home market. For regulated industries in particular, where trust is foundational, this consistency has direct business value.

Our work with IG Group illustrates this well. By providing consistent, technically accurate multilingual content across regulated markets, localisation contributed directly to stronger confidence in investor-facing and customer-facing communications across eight countries. You can read more in .

The quieter wins: internal communication

One finding that often gets overlooked in conversations about localisation ROI is its internal impact. 5% of respondents highlighted improved internal communication or training as their primary benefit, showing that localisation isn’t exclusively a customer-facing discipline.

For global organisations, the ability to communicate clearly across languages internally is just as important as external messaging. Multilingual training materials ensure that employees in every market receive the same quality of onboarding and development. Internal policies, compliance documentation and operational procedures all carry risk when they’re misunderstood due to language barriers. Investing in the localisation of internal content is, in many cases, an investment in operational consistency and risk management.

What about the 9% who saw no impact?

It would be easy to skip past this, but we think it’s worth acknowledging. A small proportion of respondents said localisation had made no noticeable difference to their business. In our experience, this tends to come down to strategy rather than the work itself.

Localisation delivers the most when it’s planned proactively, aligned to clear business goals and treated as an ongoing programme rather than a reactive, project-by-project exercise. Organisations that localise without first identifying which content is most critical, which markets represent the greatest opportunity or how success will be measured are less likely to see the results they’re hoping for.

If you’re not seeing the impact you expected, it’s worth asking whether localisation is embedded in your wider content and market strategy, or whether it’s still being treated as a procurement task. Our article on centralised versus decentralised localisation strategy is a useful starting point for that conversation.

What this tells us

The results reinforce something we’ve long believed: localisation, done well, has a measurable effect across multiple parts of a business, from revenue and market reach to brand strength, customer loyalty and internal alignment. The range of impact areas also reflects the diversity of our client base, spanning industries with very different content needs and internationalisation goals.

We’re grateful to everyone who took the time to respond this year, and we’ll be drawing on these findings as we continue to develop how we work with you. If any of this resonates or prompts questions about your own localisation programme, we’d love to hear from you at info@stptrans.com.

Would you like to share your thoughts? Join 100+ localisation buyers in this 1-question survey below, and tell us the impact of localisation in your organisation.

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From this year’s success to next year’s ambition: Your localisation plan

Emma Belanger — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 11:45:01 +0000

How successful were your multilingual content efforts this year? What will your new year look like? These questions aren’t easy to answer without taking the necessary steps to gather and assess your localisation data. In this article, we take you through several tips and scenarios for ending this year and ringing in the next on a reflective and proactive note.

Evaluate this year’s localisation efforts

Analyse localisation-related data from the year gone by to determine whether you met your goals and what you want to change in the new year.

Without localisation data, analysing and planning an effective localisation strategy is nearly impossible. You need this to show the decision-makers in your company that you have managed your localisation budget well and made it go as far as possible. Such data could include how much you’ve spent, how much content has been localised and into which languages, cost and volume trends, or any other metric you find useful to track. You should be able to consult your language services partner for this data; they can keep track of such things for you.

However, to get the full picture, combine this information with data related to the performance of the multilingual content itself, like tracking visitors to your website pages or tracking how long they stay on the localised pages. By putting all this data together, you can see how this year’s localisation strategy helped you achieve your company goals, as well as where you may have fallen short.

For example, if you’ve noticed that your sales in Sweden have jumped by 20% after localising your website and online FAQs into Swedish, but the same has not happened in the Danish market, this can be a point of change in the new year. Your marketing team and your language partner could analyse the Danish pages together and consider what may not be working for those consumers: How does the depth of your content compare with your competitors in Denmark? It could also be useful to analyse the Swedish pages in the same way to consider what is going well in that market.

Consider the qualitative feedback and reviews you have received on localised content and discuss these with your language service partner.

Besides looking at quantitative data, it can also be a useful exercise to look at qualitative feedback from your stakeholders and focus groups regarding your localised content. What have your in-house team said about the localised materials? Have any clients noted inconsistencies or errors? And this doesn’t just have to be feedback about the final translated product, either. Has anyone involved in localisation on your end found the localisation process inefficient or ineffective? Why or why not?

Ultimately, you want to ask yourself: Based on the successes you achieved or mistakes you made this year, what can be improved for next year? And how can you improve it? Then, discuss these observations with your language partner. This can help you set mutual goals that improve the process on both sides and address any concerns with the past year’s work.

Take another look at your language assets and speak with your language partner about what you may want to add in the new year.

The end of the year can be a good time to plan projects and resource updates for the next year, but you must first reflect on the year gone by. Language assets like style guides, translation memories and glossaries are incredibly useful resources for linguists, and if you didn’t get the chance to ask them for feedback throughout the year, now is a good time to check in. Would they recommend any changes be made moving forward? How often do they consult the language resources?

Strategise and plan for a winning new year

Talk about your business goals with your language service partner.

When it comes to building an ongoing collaboration with a language services partner, it’s essential to share the goals and expectations you have in mind. Setting aside time for larger strategic discussions may feel like a waste of time when you have a project that requires a quick turn-around time, but it can significantly improve the long-term collaboration, streamlining processes and leading to greater overall satisfaction on both sides. As you head into a new year, sharing goals with your language partner means that they can be ready to handle changes like peaks in volume, new language combinations, or content adaptations due to rebranding.

Proactively profile content you plan to write to estimate which solutions you will need from your language service partner.

Do you already know that you will need to update your internal policies at the start of the year across multiple languages? Are you going to try to penetrate any new markets in the new year and need your website localised? Information like this can help inform your localisation budget and strategy for the next year, and you can consult your language partner to ask any specific questions about solutions or cost.

For example, if you wish to localise your website into German in the new year, you may want a quote for the overall project, as well as an understanding of the website localisation solutions that a language service provider can offer you, such as SEO and desktop publishing.

Connect the relevant members of your team with your language service partner’s localisation team, encouraging good communication for the year ahead.

Without clear communication links between your team and the localisation team, whether it’s with a project manager or specific linguists, you’ll struggle to build a collaborative environment for discussions and setting actionable goals and milestones for the future. The start of the year can be the perfect time for connecting people, as they may have a little more time on their hands to set up a meeting and chat about their expectations for the year ahead.

But beyond this first step, how can you continue to facilitate good communication throughout next year? Make time for regular business review meetings to discuss progress and challenges with your language partner and make sure to think about what is meaningful and productive for such meetings. Don’t feel that you need to invite and involve everyone from both parties just for show. For example, if the agenda for the meeting is strategic, keep the attendees to the appropriate management level people. If it’s hands-on production related, such as a meeting to discuss changes to a style guide, just invite the people from the teams managing the daily work.

Set yourself up for success in the new year

Taking the time to go through each of the steps above and consult with your language partner may seem long-winded, but heading into the new year with a clear plan can save you a lot of trouble further down the road. Take it from us, the key to seeing positive localisation results is to invest time in a localisation strategy that aligns with your business objectives and is communicated clearly to your language services partner.

For more on localisation strategy and analysis, contact us for a chat at info@stptrans.com.

This article was originally published in December 2024 and updated in December 2025.

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Web accessibility in 2025: What UK and EU businesses must know

Emma Belanger — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 10:47:14 +0000

With currently failing to meet accessibility standards, businesses across the UK and EU face an urgent wake-up call as new regulations take effect in 2025. The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is becoming a business-critical requirement that could fundamentally change how you approach your digital presence.

For the globally with vision impairments and the who have disabilities, these changes represent long-overdue progress. For businesses, they represent both a compliance challenge and a competitive opportunity.

We’ve created a comprehensive e-book, “Web Accessibility Standards in the UK and EU: What Businesses Need to Know”, to help you navigate these web accessibility changes in 2025 with confidence.

What you’ll discover in our free e-book

New requirements that affect your business

The EAA represents one of the most comprehensive accessibility initiatives globally, with requirements affecting both public and private organisations across all EU member states. Unlike previous regulations that primarily targeted public sector bodies, the EAA explicitly includes private businesses, particularly those providing services to the public.

Key regulatory changes include:

WCAG 2.1 AA standards are becoming the recommended compliance level across EU member states
Expanded coverage to private sector organisations, including e-commerce platforms
Elimination of size exemptions – small and medium enterprises must also ensure digital accessibility
Clear enforcement mechanisms with varying approaches from warnings to substantial financial penalties

Who must comply?

While larger enterprises may face more comprehensive requirements, SMEs must also ensure their digital properties meet accessibility standards. If you’re serving the public, regardless of your company size, compliance is likely required.

High-risk sectors include:

E-commerce companies: 77% of US ADA website accessibility lawsuits targeted e-commerce sites
Financial services: Secure transaction processes must maintain both security and accessibility standards
Healthcare and life sciences: Medical information must be accessible to users with various disabilities
Technology companies: User interfaces and documentation present complex accessibility challenges

The cost of non-compliance

The consequences extend far beyond potential fines. Website accessibility lawsuits are growing, with legal precedent increasingly favouring users who encounter accessibility barriers.

Beyond legal risks, non-compliance creates:

Brand reputation damage: In an era where inclusion matters to consumers, accessibility failures significantly impact brand image
Lost revenue opportunities: People with disabilities represent 20% of website visitors with substantial purchasing power
Competitive disadvantage: Search engines like Google incorporate accessibility factors into ranking algorithms
Recruitment challenges: Top talent increasingly seeks employers who demonstrate a commitment to inclusion

Technical requirements made simple

Our e-book breaks down the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA standards into actionable requirements organised around four fundamental principles, known as POUR:

Perceivable: Information must be presentable in ways all users can perceive
Operable: User interfaces must be operable by all users, including keyboard navigation
Understandable: Information and interface operation must be clear and predictable
Robust: Content must work reliably with assistive technologies

Mobile and multilingual accessibility challenges

As mobile usage continues growing, mobile accessibility becomes increasingly critical, and our e-book covers the mobile accessibility considerations organisations may want to take into account. For businesses operating internationally, we address the complex intersection of multilingual content and accessibility requirements.

How Sandberg bridges the language-accessibility gap

At Sandberg, we understand that accessibility and language access are interconnected challenges. Businesses operating in multiple countries must ensure content is accessible not just technically, but linguistically accessible to diverse user populations.

This includes understanding the cultural nuance of accessibility and inclusive language. Read more about this topic in our article about communicating inclusivity in the Nordic languages. Since you can’t realistically be an expert in all the languages your users speak, a provider like Sandberg can help you build a diverse, loyal audience.

Our solutions

Transcription Services
Video Subtitling
Voiceovers
Multilingual SEO
PDF Remediation

Why the integrated approach matters

Organisations that recognise the connections between accessibility, internationalisation and user experience often find their accessibility investments provide multiple returns, including improved SEO performance, higher customer satisfaction and even greater growth in global markets.

Start today: Download your free guide

Don’t wait to start your accessibility journey. The businesses that begin now will have significant advantages: more time for thorough testing, user feedback integration, staff training and sustainable implementation that evolves with changing requirements.

Download your free copy of “Web Accessibility Standards in the UK and EU: What Businesses Need to Know” and discover:

Step-by-step implementation strategies that work
Cost-effective approaches to compliance
Industry-specific considerations
How to turn accessibility into a competitive advantage
Resources for ongoing compliance monitoring

Ready to make your digital presence truly inclusive? Contact Sandberg today to discuss how our language solutions can help your business thrive in the new regulatory landscape.

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Centralised vs decentralised: Which localisation strategy is best?

Emma Belanger — Tue, 13 May 2025 07:00:50 +0000

In today’s globalised market, businesses must communicate effectively with audiences across various regions and cultures through different content.

The way you manage and control your global content can influence your brand, user adoption, sales, talent acquisition, regulatory compliance and many more content-bound operations.

A centralised content localisation strategy involves managing and controlling content adaptation from a central hub, ensuring consistency and coherence across all markets. This approach has gained traction for most content types as companies expand their international presence.

On the other hand, a decentralised or localised approach where local branches and teams own their content might yield better results for marketing and sales-related content.

And there are definitely cases where a hybrid approach is the best option. The decision is unique for every company as it is driven by your available resources and limitations, your maturity and your goals.

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the benefits and risks of each content localisation strategy to help you determine which best aligns with your goals.

Why choose a centralised localisation strategy?

This strategy offers compelling benefits: it promotes brand consistency, improves cost and resource efficiency, enables streamlined workflows and supports data-driven decision-making at scale. By consolidating operations, you can maintain control over quality, terminology and messaging while leveraging automation to handle large volumes of content efficiently.

However, centralisation doesn’t come without trade-offs. It may limit flexibility, reduce local cultural sensitivity and introduce bottlenecks or single points of failure if not managed carefully. Let’s explore the benefits and risks of this strategy in more detail.

Consistency

Uniform branding and messaging: Centralised management ensures that brand identity, tone and messaging remain consistent across all regions.
Standardised quality control: Quality assurance processes are easier to manage, ensuring that all localised content adheres to brand standards.
Terminological accuracy: Terminology is harmonised, mitigating the risk for product recalls, regulatory glitches and claims, but also providing a more consistent user experience across content.

Cost and resource efficiency

Reduced overall costs: Centralised strategies often reduce overall costs through bulk purchasing of services, software or resources.
Reduced duplication of efforts: Redundant work is avoided by consolidating content creation and management, meaning all content can be leveraged at any time to speed up localisation processes. This can also help reduce costs, as you won’t have to pay for content to be localised twice.
Centralised training and development: Training programmes can be standardised and disseminated across teams, ensuring consistent knowledge transfer.

Streamlined processes

Coordinated workflows: Centralised control supports better planning and streamlined collaboration across departments.
Efficient feedback loops: Feedback can be shared between teams, ensuring that any issues or suggestions for improvement are quickly addressed and do not have to be duplicated across teams.
Automation: The bigger the volumes and the higher the level of standardisation, like documents with consistent formatting or phrasing, the more companies and teams can benefit from centralised automation of their localisation processes.

Strategic decision-making

Data-driven insights: A centralised localisation strategy also means that you will avoid collating data from lots of different teams and instead have one place to evaluate data on content volume, language distribution and market performance.
- For more on how this data can help inform your strategy, read our article on localisation strategy and planning.
Content profiling: With a centralised localisation team, you can also implement new processes like content profiling to understand how to categorise and prioritise company content based on its purpose and target audience.
- This method helps you save money on less critical materials, such as survey feedback, and ensure accuracy when it comes to brand-essential content, like marketing collateral. To better understand how to profile your company content, check out our article: Content profiling: A blueprint for multilingual excellence.

Risks of a centralised localisation strategy

Potential cultural misunderstandings: Centralised strategies may miss the subtle cultural nuances essential for local engagement, and limited autonomy for local teams may result in less effective messaging.
Coordination challenges: Coordinating across multiple regions from one hub can lead to misunderstandings and operational inefficiencies. Additionally, decision-making may be delayed as local requests wait for central approval.
Risk of central failure: A disruption at the central level can negatively impact all markets simultaneously.
Investment in implementation: Establishing a centralised system often involves significant financial and time investments, as well as infrastructure changes and training needs.

Why choose a decentralised localisation strategy?

In a world where local relevance can make or break a brand’s success, many organisations opt for a decentralised localisation strategy, placing content creation and adaptation in the hands of local teams across different markets.��

This approach offers a number of advantages: it delivers more tailored messaging to local audiences and empowers local teams to react quickly and innovate. By giving autonomy to regional teams, you can create content that feels authentic, resonates with local audiences and keeps pace with real-time market dynamics.��

Yet, decentralisation comes with its own set of challenges. Without a strong central framework, you may struggle with inconsistent branding, duplicated efforts, communication difficulties and increased training and coordination costs. In the following sections, we explore the key benefits and potential risks of decentralised localisation.��

Greater local relevance��

Deeper market insight: In-country experts often have better insights into consumer behaviour and can adapt content accordingly.
Cultural sensitivity and tailored messaging: Local teams understand regional norms, idioms, humour and preferences, leading to content that might resonate more deeply with local audiences. Marketing campaigns can be adapted to local trends, holidays or current events for better engagement.
Empowered local teams: Giving autonomy fosters ownership, motivation and innovation within regional teams.

Faster market response��

Agility and responsiveness: Local teams can act quickly without waiting for central approval, making it easier to adapt to fast-changing market conditions or customer feedback. Teams can address issues or controversies swiftly, with messaging tailored to the local context.

Experimentation and innovation��

Testing ground: Local markets can serve as testing grounds for new strategies or campaigns that may later be scaled up globally.
Diverse ideas: Decentralisation encourages creativity and a broad pool of ideas from different markets.

Risks of a decentralised localisation strategy

Diluted brand identity: Without strict central oversight, brand messaging, tone and visual elements may vary significantly between regions. Disparities in content quality or tone may confuse global customers or undermine trust.
Duplication of efforts: Multiple teams might independently create similar localised content, leading to wasted time and resources. Furthermore, without shared infrastructure, tools and subscriptions may be purchased redundantly across teams.
Communication challenges: Aligning cross-regional strategies becomes more difficult with multiple independent teams. Some regions may lack the skilled personnel or tools necessary for high-quality localisation.
Training overhead: Training must be conducted in multiple locations and tailored to different teams, increasing overall costs.

Choosing the right localisation strategy for you

When choosing a strategy, you should consider your company’s size, industry, market diversity and goals. Do you need to foster a more local approach to build awareness of your brand in local markets? If so, you’ll need to include regional teams in your strategy, whether that’s through a decentralised approach or a hybrid strategy.

You should also take a look at your content. Standardised content, such as technical manuals or legal documents, might benefit from centralisation because you can create automated processes and save time and money. On the other hand, nuanced and creative marketing content may turn out better with more input from local teams, who understand their audience’s preferences.

For many, a hybrid approach that balances central control with local flexibility may provide the best of both worlds, but the first step is to understand the benefits and risks of each approach. Ultimately, companies seeking to optimise their global presence must weigh the trade-offs carefully to ensure their localisation strategy effectively meets their goals.

If you’re looking for any assistance with evaluating your own localisation goals and strategy, send us a message at��info@stptrans.com.

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Localisation strategy Archives - sa���ʴ�ý