Banner localization. A picture says a thousand words.

When thinking about localization and translation, many people’s minds will go straight to text-based content such as case studies or to audiovisual content such as video or podcasts. While it’s true that localization is often used with these types of content, there are also many instances of banners and images needing to be localized.

While banners, for example, are not usually text-heavy, they do use some copy to attract the potential customer’s interest. This hook is generally accompanied by a subline (potentially multiple in the case of animated banners) as well as a call to action, such as “join now”.

Banner localization involves both translation and design work. During the localization process, teams need to consider several key points:

• Word expansion – some languages user longer words, larger characters to share the same content, which can have significant impacts on design
• Local standards – colours used in different industries differ from locale to locale for example. It’s important for banners to resonate with local audiences.
• Design direction – if the banner is going from a market in which audiences read from left-to-right, the design will need to be heavily modified for right-to-left audiences.

How to localize a banner ad campaign

Once text included in the banners has been through translation, desktop publishing (DTP) teams begin the image translation process in tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, or Adobe Animate, using editable source files provided by the client. These teams adapt the content and graphics to the target language, with special care needed to select new fonts for Asian languages (in agreement with the client).

In some cases, clients don’t have any editable files to share with their language service providers. In this situation, DTP and graphics localization teams will need to adapt and manipulate the files to match the source files visually, with text replaced with the target language.

Of course, there are times that content creation or transcreation might work better than localization. Creating wholly new content for each region can be challenging, but it can have impressive rewards for companies that take the time and money to invest in their international client base.

Alpha CRC is an Enterprise Localization company that specializes in providing end-to-end localization services to global clients, including banner localization and content origination.