Today’s brands are increasingly global, and to maintain a strong global presence, localization must be prioritized. By localizing your digital presence – be it a website, a SaaS or an app – you can reach a wider audience and boost your SEO around the world to gain a competitive edge.
Half of all Google queries are performed in languages other than English. Localization has been shown to increase search traffic by 47% and boost conversion rates by 20%, and apps that fail to localize can lose 13% of users.
Consumers are simply more likely to engage with brands who speak their language because it builds trust – and for most people, it’s just easier for them. Even among those who speak English, 65% prefer to read content in their primary language.
Your prospects are not the only ones who benefit from localization; localizing internal data tools and back-office applications helps global teams to be more productive, while supporting diversity and inclusivity initiatives across organizations.
Given all of these benefits, it would make sense for developers to localize their content so users can consume it in their local language – yet currently, 62.4% of all websites are available only in English. Why is that? Because adapting omnichannel experiences and apps to fit the needs of a specific geographic region usually requires time-consuming and expensive manual effort.
It’s a slow process that can delay time-to-market and tie up developer resources. What’s more, keeping messaging consistent across languages can be challenging.
So, what’s the solution?
A Truly Multilingual Solution
Directus is used by people all over the world to build engaging data-driven apps and omnichannel experiences. It democratizes data across organizations by providing technical and non-technical users with a safe, simple and efficient way to leverage new and existing databases and extract maximum value from company data.
And, because the audience for Directus is global, we’ve built the platform with internationalization in mind. It’s truly multilingual – not only does Directus allow you to easily author and manage multilingual content, the App itself can also be made available in any number of languages.
Let’s examine three ways Directus has incorporated multilingual capabilities into its Open Data Platform, making it truly international and open:
1. Multilingual Content and Data Management
Directus enables you to store translations of data in tables, which is extremely useful for managing content, such as a digital experience or web property. For example, you may want to store Spanish versions of your knowledge base articles or blog posts alongside the English versions to cater to Spanish-speaking audiences. Achieving this in Directus is as easy as setting up language tables to store the translations.
The platform’s interface enables you to manage content in as many languages as needed. Instead of simply creating new fields for each language, the interface stores translations relationally, eliminating the need for duplicate fields for each language. As such, language-agnostic data such as dates or toggles can remain within the parent item. Once this is complete, when you create new content in the source language, it can be manually translated to ensure accuracy or by using an automated translation service via an API integration.
2. A Rich Multilingual App Experience
Providing a truly international experience isn’t just about localizing content into multiple languages. While translating your data is critical, if your staff is doing that work within an app that is not their primary language, inefficiencies and errors abound.
To that end, native support for translating an app’s user interface, schema attributes and all other user-defined options is also essential.
Directus is the only data management solution that delivers an app experience that is end-to-end multilingual and internationalized with localized dates, number and currency formats. Currently, Directus is available in 55 languages, but as new users contribute additional translations, that list continues to grow. In fact, since our locales are entirely open-source, anyone can add a new language to our platform here.
3. Multilingual Metadata? Absolutely!
Supporting translated content within a multilingual App would still fall short if it did not provide support for multilingual metadata for everything in between. With Directus, all metadata – user-generated options, placeholders, multi-select choices, field notes and more – can be rendered in any language. The Directus App is highly customizable – and that level of customization warrants multilingual support, as well.
Global from the Ground Up
With built-in, extensive multilingual support, the Directus Open Data Platform empowers organizations to unlock the full potential of the global marketplace, with far less effort and cost than traditional localization solutions. But outside of the platform itself, Directus maintains an international presence, and a culture that’s as rich and diverse as the customers we serve.
Our team is globally distributed by design, with employees who speak many languages, and our platform powers international projects for customers on nearly every continent.
Additionally, our Cloud offering supports more than 17 regions worldwide, and it’s all wrapped in a global content-delivery network (CDN) for fast edge delivery.