As we have previously seen, offering a properly localized web-application is a key success factor to launch in european markets. Our case study will today be about Zoho Docs.
Zoho is a suite of applications that might be useful to SMB's. Chat, Docs, Emails, Forms, ... A lot of tools are available on Zoho. We will specifically focus on Zoho Docs.
The first thing to do, to size up the localization of Zoho Docs is to change the profile settings to define French as the default language. Once we have done this, we should see the french UI.
This is where problems begin. The first thing that we will notice is that the interface is only partly localized. French strings and english strings are mixed up. Almost 40%, if not 50% of these strings are still in english. Lets have a look.
In the main menu of Zoho Docs, "Upgrade", "Start Free Trial", "Zoho Apps", "Getting Started" and "Help" are english strings. Only 3 out of 8 strings are in french.
On the left, the navigation pane is also a combination of french and english words. "Create new", "Personal Folders" and "Trash" are english ones.
Just below, you will see other tabs that are facing the same issue, some of them being exclusively in english.
In the above screenshots, "Workspace", "Shared Docs" and "Groups" are english words, and the content of the "Shared Docs" tab is only in english.
The second important thing to look at to determine if the localization is properly done is the help that is offered by the service. A european user would at least expect the FAQ and the documentation to be translated. In this case, there are 5 ways to get help. Neither this menu nor the different sections have been translated in the language we previously choosed.
Thus we can see that the "What's new" section is only in english, the "Help Documents" is in english, chinese and what we think is japanese, and FAQ, Forums and Blogs are not localized at all.
It is obvious that if you want foreign customers to pay for your service, such as is Zoho expecting, you can't say to them that they will be able to use your tool in their own language, if it is not properly localized. It doesn't look like a professional service. It is perhaps even worse than if you would have done nothing.
In such a case, if Zoho had required some help from a specialized french partner such as we are, they would have identified all the strings that needed to be localized, and they would have translated at least the most important articles of the knowledge base.
