Mirela
To be inclusive means avoiding assumptions about what’s “normal” and making space for a wider range of identities and experiences. This applies to many aspects of life and business, including localization. Inclusive localization considers the full experience surrounding translated text to ensure all users feel accommodated. If you’re interested in making all your users feel seen, keep reading as we explore the topic in more depth.
What is inclusive localization?
Inclusive localization means to adapt content, products, and experiences so they work for people with different identities, backgrounds, abilities, and cultural contexts. With traditional localization, we focused on language and regional adaptation. Inclusive localization takes it further, as we would also review whether the language excludes certain groups, whether screen readers work correctly in the target language, whether images reflect the local audience, and whether forms support different naming conventions. Translation is just part of the job, not the whole job.
First off, prepare the source content
Sometimes, inclusion problems are already baked into the product, and you shouldn’t expect a translator to fix that. The best source content is flexible. It doesn’t assume a user’s gender, family structure, education level, religion, nationality, or physical ability unless that information is genuinely relevant.
Examples:
| Don’t use | More inclusive approach |
|---|---|
| Dear Sir/Madam | Hello |
| Husband/wife | Partner/spouse |
| First name/Last name | Full name |
| The salesman will contact you | A sales representative will contact you |
If you write your source content in a more inclusive way, translators will spend less time trying to solve the problems found in the original text. Don’t worry, the changes you make won’t make the content less clear. What you’ll achieve instead is much more natural translations and fewer review cycles. Overall, you’ll give your users a better experience, and that’s always our goal with localization.
Be careful with gendered language
Gender is one of the most discussed topics in localization, and that’s because languages handle it differently. Gendered language is a linguistic system that categorizes the world through the lens of the male/female binary. It comes in three distinct ways:
- Grammatical gender. In some languages (e.g., French, Spanish,) every noun is assigned a gender. A table might be feminine and a book is masculine.
- Occupational stereotyping. This means using suffixes or specific terms that imply a job belongs to a certain sex: waitress, chairman, or stewardess.
- The “universal masculine,” or the historical habit of using masculine pronouns (he/him) or nouns (mankind) to represent all of humanity.
English gives writers relatively flexible options such as using “they,” “their,” or gender-neutral job titles without changing the meaning of a sentence. Many other languages aren’t so simple. A useful approach is to create language-specific style guides that document preferred terminology, pronoun usage, and gender-inclusive alternatives.
Examples:
| Source | More inclusive approach |
|---|---|
| Every employee should submit his report by Friday. | Employees should submit their reports by Friday. |
| The chairman will approve the request. | The chairperson will approve the request. |
| Welcome, guys! | Welcome, everyone! |
Integrate accessibility
A surprising number of organizations localize content and forget accessibility. But according to the World Health Organization, about 15% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability, around 2.5 billion people are projected to have some degree of hearing loss, and at least 2.2 billion people live with vision impairment or blindness.
When we localize, we adapt content for a specific culture. If that adaptation excludes users with visual, auditory, or cognitive impairments in that region, the localization has failed its primary goal: universal access.
Many users rely on content that isn’t immediately visible. Every app also contains hundreds of small pieces of supporting content: image descriptions, captions, form instructions, validation messages, navigation labels. Users rely on them every day, especially when using assistive technologies. If those elements stay in the source language, the product isn’t fully localized.
Accessibility requirements also change across languages. As we discussed in the past, languages vary in length, structure, reading patterns, and complexity. Unfortunately, these differences affect accessibility too. Language should be adapted for those who struggle with reading comprehension or understanding a specific topic. Formats like Easy English or FALC (Facile à lire et à comprendre) are essential for ensuring information is accessible to everyone.
Make sure people feel represented
We already know that users are more likely to trust a product when the experience feels socially and culturally recognizable. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should tailor absolutely everything for every single market. Most companies don’t have the budget for that. What you can do is pay attention to patterns.
Aspects like colors, clothing styles, gestures, workplaces, family dynamics, and social expectations vary across regions. But stock-photo diversity without cultural context will feel artificial. Sometimes it creates new problems because the imagery doesn’t really line up with the market expectations.
Examples:
| Product decision | Who may feel excluded |
|---|---|
| Only allowing “male” or “female” in profile settings. | Non-binary users. |
| Requiring users to choose “Mr.” or “Mrs.” | Users from cultures where titles are uncommon. |
| Assuming every household has 2 parents. | Single-parent or multigenerational families. |
| Using only Latin characters in forms. | Users with names in other writing systems. |
| Supporting only Western calendar formats. | Users relying on local calendars. |
Technical inclusivity
Many global products are designed first in English, but words in this language are relatively short. English doesn’t use grammatical gender in most UI text. English reads left-to-right. English keyboards and naming conventions become the default. Now translate into languages that expand a lot, or that read right-to-left. You’ll definitely see a lot of UI elements breaking.
Names are also one of the biggest problems, because some users may have multiple family names, or quite a lor of first names. You can’t use the same character limits, can you? Plus, some names contain characters, spaces, apostrophes, or diacritics that systems reject for no good reason.
Regional addresses are structured differently too. Some countries don’t use postal codes consistently, some place building numbers before street names, and others use administrative regions unfamiliar to foreign developers. Surely, you don’t want your users to abandon their shopping cart just because because the form wouldn’t accept their address format.
Inclusive products are flexible by design. They’re built to accommodate different languages, writing systems, naming conventions, device, and ways of navigating interfaces. That flexibility usually comes from early engineering decisions, which means internationalization, the first step to localization.
Final thoughts
The interesting thing about inclusive localization is that many of the improvements benefit everyone. All users will appreciate clearer UX writing, not just non-native speakers. Flexible forms help for everyone, not just people with non-Western names. And captions help people in noisy environments or who simply don’t want to listen to the audio, not only users with hearing impairments. The same goes for technical decisions. These actions can shape trust faster than most branding campaigns ever will.