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Localisation is the process of adapting a product or service to make it suitable for a new area (says Oxford Dictionary). What exactly you adapt and how, and who decides what is suitable is up to you.

So no, localisation will not make sure that your target customers don’t wave you goodbye before even trying your product – you need to make sure you have a process for that. You can call that process “localisation” if you like, but bear in mind that what “localisation” means to you might be something very different for someone else.

A good example of this has just landed into our inbox. We’ve got an email from the owner of a boutique translation agency. He has found out that one of us did some localisation consulting work for SAP recently, so he is wondering whether it is not too crazy to think of his small agency approaching a giant like SAP to offer “localisation services”.