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Case Study : Zoho Docs fails its internationalization

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.

Case study : Hootsuite launches in Europe

With this article, we would like to introduce to you a new category on this blog. Called "They launch in France...", we will use it to describe start-ups that launch in France, and see how they proceed and what can be improved.

The first company we will consider is Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a social dashboard that helps you manage your presence on the different social networks. It is particularly relevant for agencies or companies that need to have a clear sight of their online presence and of the interactions that are generated by this presence. Thus, Hootsuite provides analytics or scheduled publication tools.

They are available from France and announced that they launched in France due to an internationalization program. Everybody can contribute to the translation of Hootsuite. Crowd-sourcing the localization is an excellent way to have a quick deployment in a lot of countries; but it also implies that you don't really control the quality of the translation, and sometimes it feels like it's not a professional one.

On the Translate Program page, Hootsuite says that the french localization is almost 100% done. Lets consider it.