Passport? Check. Money? Check. Cat sitter? Check. Global SEM strategy? Ch…huh? Planning for a global website launch requires some forethought, much like planning for a trip around the world. Our Top 10 Tips article gives you our suggestions for making the most of your global website launch. From internal code to external user-facing content, we know how to take websites global, and we want to share our tips with you.
Byte Level Research’s 2013 Web Globalization Report Card is released, and is full of information for how to take your global website to the top of the class. Selection criteria highlight use of mobile sites, social media, the number of languages, and how easy it is for global users to find information that is relevant to their market.
Not surprisingly, Google holds the top spot. Below that, major global brands have shifted up and down the scale, and there are eight companies from 2012 who are nowhere to be found this year (including one of the former top ten!). Check out our post to find out who’s reaching global audiences most effectively, and what makes a good global website great.
To ensure a successful global website launch, it’s good to consider some issues early on in the process, such as your own content management system’s (CMS) infrastructure and capabilities for handling multilingual content, the relevancy of your content for your global users, and the general tone and style you want to impart in translation. If you’re preparing to launch your site internationally, today’s post gives you some good starting points, and links to our more detailed newsletter article on the same topic.
When Breastcancer.org sought to expand their mission to Spanish speakers around the world, they needed more than just a run-of-the-mill translation of their website. They wanted a true partner who knew how to speak to their users accurately and compassionately, mirroring the effort and care that is evident on their English site. Acclaro is proud to have been selected as their vendor of choice. How did we meet the challenge? Read on to find out.
Translating your website for international audiences is the first and most important step in launching your brand online overseas. Even if your target countries have a high degree of English-speaking consumers, recent studies show that 85% of online shoppers will only purchase from native language websites.
Translation, however, is not the whole picture. Optimizing your website’s usability for these new markets will help ensure that your brand is represented well. Just as with your U.S. site, your metrics for conversions and goal completion will depend largely on how well you’ve localized and tested interface and design elements of your site.
If you’re preparing for a new international launch, be sure to take these five tips with you as you meet with stakeholders in your global expansion project. A few smart technical decisions at the outset will boost the credibility and usability of your site in the long run.
A successful online launch of your website in new international markets depends on more than solid translation. While a recent study from the Common Sense Advisory found that 85% of online shoppers will only buy from a site in their native language, language alone is not the only driver behind global brand growth online.
In this blog post we’ll take a design-centric look at localization choices to consider before your next international launch, specifically the design elements crucial to succeeding in high-context cultures. Never heard of high-context vs. low-context culture distinctions? Don’t worry!
After the jump we’ll help you see the world with a brand new pair of eyes.
How do you explore new international markets for your business online when full translation and localization of your website is a significant commitment? An affordable alternative to global market research is the multilingual microsite. Done well, it not only positions you for greater success abroad, but might also open your eyes to unrealized opportunities.
A microsite can be a condensed version of your full website — whether it’s for eCommerce, customer support or marketing. Or it can be a minisite that delves deeply into your brand, a specific product or value proposition. No matter the microsite’s focus, it’s a concerted effort to introduce new audiences to your brand, gauge demand and meet product- or brand-specific objectives in a controlled environment online.
In this article we’ll suggest 10 ways to maximize impact while minimizing cost when thinking about international microsites.
In celebration of Acclaro's tenth anniversary, we are taking a look back at how our industry has changed over the past decade. In this post, we cover a topic that is near and dear to anyone involved in the localization industry: websites. The last ten years saw some pretty phenomenal changes in the development of global websites, perhaps more so than any other medium we work with. Curious to know more? Acclaro's own Localization Geek, Jon Ritzdorf, explains.
Just because we're already savvy with web localization (including web apps) doesn't mean we still can't learn a thing or two. Acclaro now adds Ruby on Rails (RoR), an increasingly popular web application development framework, to our list of web localization specialties.
"Never a dull moment" is a commonly-uttered phrase around here. Because we deal with a large variety of clients and industries, each translation project has its own personality, and in 2011 we ran the gamut when it came to helping some wildly different businesses connect with global audiences (and we had a lot of fun doing it, too!).
In this post, we review recent projects for four Acclaro clients — Netflix, Opus One, Breastcancer.org, and Amway, also highlighted in our Q4 2011 newsletter — and take a look at what makes each of their translation projects unique.
This January, largely due to grassroots organizing on social media platforms, U.S. internet users witnessed the demise of two proposed laws, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), and PIPA (PROTECT IP Act). These bills were both designed to expand the power of U.S. law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property...and were met with resistance by U.S. internet users from coast to coast. If, like millions of others, you celebrated the defeat of SOPA/PIPA, you may want to put a cork in that champagne. It turns out there’s a much more far reaching agreement, called ACTA. International in scope, it may affect what your business is able to do (or not do) online.
FREE WEBINAR ALERT! Come one, come all to hear Acclaro Globalization Architect, Jon Ritzdorf, present “Website Translation: Conquering new Language Markets to Gain New Sales” on Tuesday, January 31, at 9 AM Pacific / 12 PM Eastern. If you are looking to expand your global reach, Jon will give you valuable tips to consider for your international web presence. Click through for more information and registration.
If you work with a content management system (CMS), such as Drupal, Sharepoint, Joomla, or Wordpress, and are considering localizing the website that lives inside of it, you may wonder how well it will play with your languages. Or, if you're trying to find the right CMS that supports the localization process, you'll need to ask a few questions, such as: Will the text display correctly? Will the CMS be able to keep language content separate? Not all CMSs handle things the same way, so it's best to figure out the answers before you start the localization process and/or before move to a new CMS. Read a quick review of the basic questions you need to ask, or read our full article on how to choose the best CMS for your localization needs.
Think your company just might be ready
to grow your business to the next level online? It might be time to take your
organization from local or national to global, and there are five excellent
reasons to jump into international markets that are right for you: Chinese,
Spanish, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, and German – the top five languages of
almost a billion people online around the world today.
We’ll give you a head start on your research with a quick peek into those global markets and languages that are experiencing the most growth online. For an even clearer snapshot, make sure to delve into our full article as well.
Chinese: 444,948,000 Internet Users
Infrastructure improvements have encouraged millions of Chinese to surf the internet, partly due to the increased popularity in online shopping and e-banking services. Almost one-third of China's population was regularly on the web by the end of 2010. The potential market for mobile apps has expanded by leaps and bounds, too.
Spanish: 153,309,000 Internet Users
Spanish is spoken in all its many idiomatic forms from Spain to Chile to Central America — and all over the U.S. by first-generation immigrants as well as their bilingual children. This market is complex due to each country having a different "flavor" of Spanish. Do your homework and determine your goals for your project before deciding how to tackle your Spanish translations.
“Brevity is the soul of wit,” Shakespeare famously posited in Act 2 of Hamlet. Brevity may be an effective, low-cost way to introduce your product or service to international markets, too. Enter the minisite: a fun, interactive, compact teaser site that draws attention and prepares you for a larger rollout down the line…or helps judge brand interest to determine if your international markets are suitable for you and your goals.
Localizing a minisite is significantly easier and more cost-effective than a full site, and can get your name “out there” in a new region while you consider the rest of your localization strategy; e.g. do we really need our entire product catalog translated? What about SEO/PPC keywords and ads? Is our CMS ready to handle Chinese?
Here are some quick steps to help you get your minisite up and running:
1. Pick a handful of pages – really, no more than five – that share the basics of your product or service.
2. No TMIs or oversharing! Less is more here; you’re mainly trying to drum up interest so your visitors either learn the basics about your brand or highlighted product, or they immediately buy something on your site.
LinkedIn announced today that is has expanded its website
languages to include Russian, Romanian and Turkish. 100 million members strong,
with 25 million users in Europe alone, LinkedIn has become the uncontested
online destination for business professionals.
LinkedIn got it right from the start. Soon after their domestic launch, they realized that going global fast would cinch their victory in a competitive online space. Their global business ambitions took shape in a strategy, and that strategy led to website localization. They undertook the market research, became versed in international regulations, such as the EU’s International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles, and then created a business infrastructure to support their global website. In tandem with the launch of the site in German, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, LinkedIn rolled out multi-language customer support, locale-specific payment processing and advertising. The selection of LinkedIn.com as one of TIME's top websites of 2010 is proof of their success.
Thanks to their quick reaction to shifting global trends for networking, exchanging ideas and recruiting talent, the LinkedIn platform is the social medium in Europe and North America, and is gaining influence daily in the Chinese, Japanese and Indian markets. Yesterday, LinkedIn crossed a major milestone of 10 million members in India.
How do you translate your website’s
U.S. appeal for an international audience? Let’s look to three multilingual
sites from TIME’s 2010 Top 50 list for
a few examples of how website localization can be done right.
Each teaches a different lesson — but what do these sites have in common? The companies behind them took the time to really understand the true goal of website localization: making sure a user from a different culture could easily interact with their site. Rather than just translating to other languages, they optimized their interfaces to make it easy, familiar, and enjoyable for their international users to navigate, shop, and network.
1. LinkedIn: Align your website localization with your global business strategy. In order to achieve their business objectives in other language markets (German, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and French), the premier social site for professionals established:
Last year, we took a quick look at the 2010 Website
Globalization Report Card. Let’s see the 2011 Report Card and learn about this
year’s best globalized websites.
Who’s at the Top and Why It’s Not a Big Shocker:
“The Social Network” may soon be declared best picture of the year, so it’s no surprise that Facebook is #1 on the list of 250 sites, unseating international powerhouse Google. Facebook has expanded rapidly into new markets, mainly using crowdsourcing to translate their site into nearly 100 languages (including Pirate). El numero uno has also introduced some innovations such as multilingual social plug-ins to propel them into the top spot. Aside from Facebook and Google, the top ten consists of global corporations such as Cisco, 3M and Samsung. LG surged ahead in one short year from #21 to #5. Those sites ousted from the top ten versus last year’s evaluation: Wikipedia and Lenovo.
About author Jon Ritzdorf: Jon serves as the Acclaro
in-house globalization architect, regularly consulting with clients and presenting seminars for many of the world's leading IT
corporations on localization best practices, internationalization and testing
products for global release.
Web developers and marketing managers often ask me for recommendations as to
how they should configure their navigation system on their multilingual
website. Ideally this is determined well before starting website localization,
as this decision can really affect your overall global site architecture moving
forward.
For multilingual site navigation, it’s good to familiarize yourself with all the different options available for navigation and how they will impact your site. In short, with global navigation it comes down to four major options, which can be combined or kept distinct within a site:
Usually the first two options, language toggle and dropdown, work well for smaller sites.
For a small- to medium-sized site that is only going to be localized in a few languages, I would suggest the very simple toggle approach, like seen with Northeastern University. Or, a language dropdown written in the native script for the language markets you are targeting, as seen with Vuze.
1. What is HTML5?
HTML5 is a major revision to HTML and XHTML, the standard for structuring and presenting content on the Internet. It includes everything you see in your browser, such as text, images, multimedia, web apps, search forms, and so on.
2. How is it different from HTML and XHTML?
3. Why all the fuss?
Many of these new features, like video playback and drag-and-drop, have been dependent on third-party browser plug-ins like Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and Google Gears. HTML5 changes all of that. As an open source system, it supports open standards that expose underlying technologies, enabling integration, innovation and development of more complex software and services.
4. How does HTML5 affect website localization?
HTML5 is a game-changer, however, it won't drastically alter the way that your translation partner localizes your website. HTML5 is simply a revision of the "old" HTML and XHTML, and thus requires the same translation and localization skills used with previous versions.
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