For true localization, the colors and images you use in your designs will often need to be carefully adapted. The wrong choice of color can quickly sink your advertising campaign or presentation. Green, for instance, is sometimes associated with cuckoldry in certain parts of China. In other parts of the world, gestures that seem innocent or positive in one culture are seen as rude or disrespectful in others. Patting a child on the head in Thailand is considered in very poor taste, for instance. While a “thumbs up” is equivalent to the “middle finger” in some parts of Africa.

Some fonts either don’t support certain characters or simply look awkward or difficult to read when used for certain languages. Different regions and readers of different languages often have their own standards and preferences when it comes to fonts. These always need to be borne in mind. Equally, things like bold and italics are completely unsuitable for some languages or are simply never used in others.

Languages such as Arabic and Hebrew are read from right to left. Adapting your designs to accommodate this usually requires much more than simply flipping the design around. Often, certain elements of the design needed to be mirrored, while some do not – depending on local norms and preferences. Other languages and cultures require different adjustments. In Japanese and Chinese, there don’t have to be spaces between words. This means line breaks can happen at any point – even in the middle of words! There are rules and norms which govern things like this. But they need to be understood and used correctly if you want your localized designs to look natural to a native eye.

It’s a general rule of thumb in many English-speaking countries that a website, for instance, can have large areas of blank space. In fact, the use of white space between words and images is vital. Otherwise, most of your audience in places like the UK or the US will find the page too “busy”. On the other hand, people in some Asian cultures, such as China, often actively prefer the maximum amount of space to be utilized. This is an important consideration when you bear in mind that text can expand or contract when translated, taking up less or – more often – more space than it previously did.