Many entrepreneurs want to expand their business in different parts of the world. China is among the top economies in the world, so everyone wants to expand their business in China. If the head office of your business is in Japan and you want to open your subsidiary in China, then you can develop HR software to keep consistency in business operations. Here the question arises; how can they operate the software if it is not in their native language. For this, you must go for Chinese software localization services.
Show Your Digital Presence in the Chinese Market
China is the second and Japan is the third-largest economy in the world. They both are considered lucrative markets for expanding the business. If you are a Japanese entrepreneur and want to tap into the Chinese market, then first you must show your digital presence by developing the website. People buy products and services that are in their native language, so after developing the website, you must go for Chinese website localization services.
Challenges in Software Localization for Chinese Market
Japan and China have promising powerful markets. Therefore, to expand and grow your business in both markets, you must use their native language. For example, to deal with Chinese stakeholders, you must go for Chinese translation services. Moreover, if you have developed software, you should know how to translate and localize it for both markets.
Multibyte Encoding of the Language
One of the main challenges you can face if you are localizing the software for the Japanese and Chinese market is how to use the multibyte encoding of the languages because they deal with linguistic and cultural differences. No doubt that both countries share similarities in the language such as Hanzi in Chinese and Kanji in Japanese, but the Japanese language uses two alphabet systems. These both languages follow the same writing system, but they are linguistically different. Moreover, the Chinese language is simpler than the Japanese language. For instance, verbs don’t contain tenses in the Chinese language, and they don’t represent adjectives. In the same way, verbs are without tenses in the Japanese language, and they don’t modify adjectives. Therefore, if you are going for Chinese software localization services, then hire a reliable translation company. They know the linguistic intricacies of both languages and provide you with Chinese Translation Services accordingly. Furthermore, they know these both languages are written vertically and horizontally. Additionally, If they want to cater to the Chinese market, then they should go for both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Differentiating between both languages, Chinese and Japanese, is very difficult because both languages don’t possess a pure alphabet.
Cultural Differences
People will not be able to operate the software if cultural differences are not kept in mind. The translation company that is localizing your software should consider cultural sensitivity so that they can make software workable in the local culture. Many cultural differences can make software localization difficult. Some of them are
· Use of different colors, icons, numbers, and connotations of symbols.
· Currency
· Standard writing pattern regarding name and addresses
· Format of dates and numbers.
Technical Challenges
Apart from cultural and linguistic challenges, the software localization for the Chinese market also faces some technical challenges.
As multibyte support is required to support both languages, so the technical choice of encoding is Unicode. At present, there are many handy software development tools and programming languages that support Unicode compatibility. However, some legacy programs don’t support Unicode. Do you want to know what is the main cause of software translation and localization success? It is Unicode.
At times, it can cause a problem because many software contains massive data that can only be processed by byte, and further, the problem can occur when characters are ported to Unicode. Other technical challenges that you can face in software localization are
· The user interface of the software requires different sizes and fonts.
· The characters can either be two-byte or one byte.
· Consideration of the spaces after translation
· You require six types of encoding for backward integration of the software.
Wrapping Up
While keeping linguistic, cultural, and technical hurdles in Chinese software localization services, you must go for re-engineering and testing work. As Japanese and Chinese languages are both complex languages, the testing process takes a lot of time and bears your expense as compared to other languages of Europe. But once you overcome the challenges of software localization, you can successfully tap into the Chinese market. Don’t forget to hire a reliable translation company to accomplish this task. The money you spend on the localization of the software will lead your business towards success. So are you ready to overcome the challenges of software localization?