Exciting news for oenophiles! Luxury winery Opus One, forged from a partnership between Baron Philippe de Rothschild and Robert Mondavi, recently partnered with Acclaro to localize their retail website for customers in four countries.
About guest author Liesbeth Matthieu: Liesbeth is the
manager of the Linguistic Quality Program at the Globalization Programs
Strategy Office at NetApp.
The Background
The in-country review process occurs at the tail end of the localization process and is often a bottleneck to a timely and high-quality multilingual launch. Even at a larger company staffed with localization veterans, linguistic review is a time-consuming task that distracts internal employees from doing their regular jobs, leading to reviewer frustration and unintentionally delaying localized marketing campaigns. This was happening at my company, NetApp.
NetApp, a four billion dollar Silicon Valley powerhouse, designs and manufactures storage systems and provides operating systems, data management, and content delivery software. The company sells these products in more than a hundred countries around the globe; in fact, 50% of NetApp revenue comes from countries outside of the United States.
Yet, before 2010, NetApp rarely released all of their localized product marketing and support material at the time of the actual product launch. Some markets did not receive localized marketing materials months or even years after launch. Potential profits were being lost because overseas markets could not promote and sell the product in the local language.
The Solution
To address this challenge, the NetApp Localization Team reviewed our localization structure and quickly learned that one of the major bottlenecks was the in-country review process. We decided to look at alternative models to improve in-country review, allowing us to have input into the review but at the same time freeing up local staff from time-consuming review tasks.
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.
Three talented women with a vision. Four Masters degrees and one Doctorate. Combined fluency in 10+ foreign languages. Forty years of localization management experience. The math is pretty impressive – and the sum is one groundbreaking group: Women in Localization, founded in 2008 in Northern California’s Silicon Valley.
Anna Schlegel of NetApp, Eva Klaudinyova of VMware, Inc. and Silvia Avary-Silveira of Symantec, are the pioneers of this new group (previously NCWL for Northern California Women in Localization), and their credentials are impressive (see their bios). Their education and professional experiences in the industry with leading international companies such as NetApp, VMware, VeriSign, Xerox, Cisco and Symantec make them the female equivalents of Warren Buffet to the localization industry. If anyone is qualified to lead an international support group for women in the field, it is most certainly these three ladies.
WL was forged out of passion for
globalization and a desire to facilitate networking among female localizers. “We wanted to
have a group for women where they could ask questions and share their
professional challenges without feeling intimidated”, Anna Schlegel explains. “This
would be a dedicated place for women to develop their careers in localization
with a goal of creating an open and collaborative forum where women could share
their expertise and experience…Women often get overlooked for career moves and
promotions, so we wanted a group where women could help each other to grow and
learn.”
Imagine
this: a multinational consumer products company, with a sophisticated global
management system in place to support international sales. Everything seems to
be going smoothly.
But as the company’s localization requirements expand at a rapid-fire pace, the translation work starts piling up. There is little to no structure around the localization process, and translations are being handled on an ad hoc basis.
The problems were quite clear:
Who is this multinational consumer products company? Amway, three years ago.
What did they do? With the help of Acclaro, they worked through pain points, identified needs, and chose to implement a centralized localization model — aptly called the Amway Localization Center.
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