When it comes to launching your product in
new languages, translation is only one part of the picture. Your brand lives or
dies with your international customers during runtime, and there’s only one way
to ensure you make a good impression: localization testing. If it sounds familiar, pat yourself on the back, because you have probably seen it before in our top ten tips article.
Before the press releases go out, get your translation project “outside the lab” for a little real-world, in-context experimentation. In this post, we’ll review three of the most important zones for localization QA, and give you an idea on how to get the real deal when it comes to customer perception.
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.
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.
If you're like us, you much prefer shopping on your favorite store's website at home in your bunny slippers (don't judge) than fighting the crowds at the mall. And you're not alone...Cyber Monday resulted in $1.25 billion dollars in online sales in the U.S. alone, according to an article on ITProPortal. While Cyber Monday is traditionally a follow-up to the post-Thanksgiving "Black Friday" event in the U.S., global ecommerce is following suit.
We have three easy steps to breaking into the rapidly growing Chinese online marketplace:
Step 1. Read our newsletter article on preparing your social media launch
Step 2. Check out this article from Fast Company to get your statistics need-to-know cultural considerations, and
Step 3. Continue reading this blog post (click "Read Full Post" below) to find out how these elements interact.
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.
If you have an English website, you know that banner ads bring customers to your site. If you want to reach out to global audiences by localizing your website, localizing your banner ads will help drive traffic to your site, as they do in English. Localizing banner ads isn't always as straightforward as you might think. You may have to customize your banner ad campaign based on regional or geographical preferences, or re-create content that you don't have in English. We'll explain how to set up your global banner ad campaign for success.
If you’re thinking about testing—or even diving into—the waters of the rapidly growing Chinese social media market, now is the time to start doing your research. With more than 400 million Internet users, most of them young, educated, and savvy about games and web socializing, there’s ample opportunity for well-prepared businesses to succeed.
We’ve got a few ideas to help you get familiar with Chinese online channels as you start out, and expand into this lucrative market in a way that’s culturally appropriate. More detail can be found in our full newsletter article.
What does 2012 rhyme with? Opportunity. Specifically, opportunity
for you to:
There’s more good news; you don’t have to go it alone. At Acclaro, we specialize in the very services you need to reach these objectives: website localization and globalization.
A few fun facts for you:
It’s often said that language and translation
are two of the biggest obstacles to successfully launching and managing a brand
in global markets. Many businesses spend millions to create beautiful campaigns
in their primary markets, and then those funds — and sometimes the company’s reputation along
with it — go down the drain because they skimp on
localization when they roll out their campaigns globally. From the poorly
translated menus and signs to major mishaps that cost companies millions of
dollars, the examples are many — and embarrassing:
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.
Conventional wisdom has it that the best, highest-quality translation method is human translation and editing (as opposed to a rules- or statistics-based machine translation tool, à la Google Translate). Certainly when style and nuanced meaning are important, there’s really nothing that takes the place of the human mind for intelligent, effective, accurate localization. But there’s also a great tool that aids our linguists during translation, adding the power and speed of computers to the fluidity and contextual smarts of the human cerebellum.
That tool is translation memory, or TM, and it helps us create better consistency both within and across projects for our clients. Translation memory can also lower costs and speed up timelines for greater efficiency.
Due to the prevalence of English-language searches in China, a unique partnership has formed between the Chinese search giant Baidu and the American "decision engine" Bing. Baidu users searching for English terms will see a selection of English search results alongside Chinese results in their browsers, providing access to an additional layer of information.
Bilingual search results, still a relatively new technology, show how the quest for information on a global scale overcomes regional language barriers...or perhaps caters to an increasingly polylingual group of internet users who are comfortable searching in one or more languages.
Language is a fluid and dynamic means of communication. Historically, translation has been best performed by human beings who can accurately adapt and express this fluidity and dynamism in the face of the logical contradictions and irregularities that most languages present. However, in recent years, “machine translation” (or MT) has started to come into its own, as its once-stoic technology – the realm of 0s and 1s – catches up to human adaptability.
Ora Solomon, vice president of sales and operations at Acclaro, describes how machine translation can complement human translation in an article for Marketing Profs:
1. Human Translation
Definition
A professional linguist (most often, an in-country native speaker) reviews your project and, using guidelines agreed on beforehand, translates it to the language you require. The goal is to speak to your audience in the most natural, effective way. You can expect human translations to be free of idiomatic errors and to flow naturally and fluently.
In Spanish they say, “Lo bueno, si breve, dos veces bueno.” The good, when brief, is
doubly good. Brevity is considered a virtue in most communication circles. In
the world of translation, however, brevity is even more: it’s a money saver.
The first thing any localization vendor will tell you about the cost of translation is that it's a direct function of word count. The more words your document, brochure, program, app or website contains, the higher the cost for translating it. Rather straightforward, right?
Containing your localization budget through reducing word count at the pre-translation stage requires a challenging time investment on your part, as no one can really perform an “audit” of your resources in your stead. To execute this effectively, you need either to distinguish between must-have and nice-to-have content through a complete content review, or pare down all of your source texts across the board through avid and diligent editing. It would definitely be easier to simply send all of your files to your language partner and hope for the best.
Yet when implemented, this phase of content review will ultimately pay off two-fold: it will save you a good sum of money on translation across all target languages, and it will make your end product better, since content that has been reviewed with a global audience in mind can be rendered more accurately.
Here are a few ideas for reducing your content as you go global with your program or product.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
What are some ingenious ways to do away with words in the context of your product? You may have the ability to substitute appropriate imagery, for example. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. Take the example of the Apple iPhone OS. English has the wonderful benefit of offering two practical and short words for the settings buttons: on/off. But in most languages, the translation would occupy the whole width of the phone screen and result in what we call TVA: total visual awkwardness. Here is what Apple did to solve that problem:
Writers these days, whether for websites, software, or documentation, face interesting
new challenges when communicating technical material and product info to a
broad-based international audience. In a recent article for the Content Wrangler, Acclaro President Michael
Kriz offers up compelling
insights and ten useful tips to help you create content for your diverse global
audience.
As we become an increasingly global economy, there is increasing demand on writers — particularly those who work with technical language that describes products and services — to adapt to the changing needs of companies’ customer demographics. When a product is slated to launch in 20 new markets, and over half of the markets require translation of documentation, it completely changes the game for the technical writer. So, to effectively scale a global business, you and your writers should keep a few things in mind.
1. Use global English – For every native speaker of English, there are about three non-native speakers. It’s important that your communication in English is understandable to all English speakers, which means short, simple sentences and no idiomatic expressions or cultural references.
“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.
Smart, fun and useful. Acclaro shares news and tips on translation, localization, language, global business and culture.