Spanish Website localization done right
With so many examples of translations done wrong or localizations that went bad, finding instances of ones done right is very hard to do.
Therefore I was really excited of finding out about Humana and their new Spanish initiative: “Nuestra Salud” (“Our Health”).
We often get asked what the right steps should be when having an English-only website and wanting to expand the information and services into other languages, particularly Spanish. So here’s great list of things Humana did right that others should follow to not lag behind:
- Website address (also know as URL): Humana has a default site in English – humana.com. Following industry standards, they opted for espanol.humana.com as the root for their Spanish initiative. But they did not stop at that. They realized that spelling it out tends to cause issues in the sense that “espanol” (with an n) is not a real word, yet saying “español” (with a tilde) is hard to type into a web address. Hence they created an “alias” for their Spanish website in the form of “humana.com/nuestra_salud” (/our_health) which makes for an easy-to-remember site that removes the complexity of having to spell out the actual address.
- Human-friendly URLs have the added advantage that aside from making them easy to remember, it’s easy to understand in all mediums – magazines, ads, and even over the telephone. There’s no confusion about how it should be typed or how certain words should be spelled.
- Consistency – From browsing their site you can tell a lot of thought and effort went into doing it. Terminology is used in a consistent fashion throughout the website.
- Proper translations – It’s obvious that a great deal of effort was spent in identifying not only the context-appropriate terminology for the English terms of their industry, but also in identifying which branded terms that needed to remain in English (e.g. MyHumana, Humana One, etc.) and which ones needed to be translated (e.g. Personal Care Account as Cuenta médica personal).
- Information clarity – Overall, the information provided is clear no matter how wide or deep you navigate. I’m glad to see they did not opted for straight translations from English words into Spanish but expanded the words into phrases that are clear in each language. For example, the English term “Life” is pretty obvious in the context of who Humana is, yet if you were to perform a straight translation, the term “Vida” would you not tell you much about what it really means and is in fact confusing. In this case they went for “seguro de vida” (life insurance) which avoids all ambiguity and makes it clear right from the start.
- Concept localization – You can tell that in some cases they also identified the overarching concept so as to translate it in a way that was clear. For example, the slogan “Guidance when you need it most” was not translated in a literal way, but was rather converted to “Su consejero cuando más lo necesita“(“Your advisor when you need it the most”) which conveys the same meaning, yet it’s more relevant for the target audience.
- “Zpeling” – Finally, it was very refreshing to see a company not afraid of using accents, tildes, open question marks and other grammatical elements that are part of the core of a language yet tend to be omitted often because “they don’t appear in a keyboard” (Would you hire someone with spelling error on their resume?)
Here are a couple of images that show some of these concepts in practice:
Humana English site
Humana Spanish site
Nevertheless, there are still some areas of improvement to take sites like this to the next level and show your customers that you really care and that you can talk to them in their language:
- In general, the Spanish version is a mirror image of the English site. Even though as we pointed out the information is clearly present in both languages, it is obvious that the target user population of the site cannot be the same for both languages: different realities, different needs, different goals, different expectations, etc. Normally those are sometimes met by a simple reorganization of the site (e.g. same collection of links yet sorted in a way that’s more relevant) all the way up to complicated reorganizations that match user’s expectations (e.g. one target population may relate a Healthcare Spending question with “Plans & Products” yet another might think of it in terms of “Health and Wellness”). In other words, each target user population deserves its own Information Architecture
- With such an ambitious effort to translate the entire site, owners need to be careful to map out all the interrelations with other sites/services. For example, when looking at individual plans, it offers information about “Humana One” and “CompBenefits” yet the link takes you to an English-only version of the site. Even though the ideal would be to have Spanish versions of every service you offer, we know that’s not financially feasible in all instances, yet in a situation like this one you should at least warn users that they will be taken to an English-only site, or upon arrival you should offer some very basic information in Spanish informing them that the rest of the content in provided only in English
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