This Global Era Forces You to Translate Sites
The internet has presented many avenues and opportunities that savvy businesses have taken advantage of in a bid to grow, and to facilitate the delivery of their services to customers. In this day and age, individuals and companies use the internet not only to get or share information, but also to sell and purchase products and services. In the business world, information is crucial, but revenues are top priority! Most businesses have opted to set-up websites because it makes it easier for prospective clients to find them.
We are often contacted by clients that want to localize their websites with the request for translators to translate directly into the content management system. Unfamiliar with export features in their system, they copy and paste content or give us access to their servers to fetch their words. Whether you use WordPress or Drupal, your web CMS offers features to facilitate the translation process, but the path to multilingual site release can be frustrating if you don’t know what to look for.
When business people approach webpage translation, they often do so from a position that’s simple and straightforward — thinking that all the translator has to do is change the words, maybe adjust for some grammar differences between languages here and there, and voilà, the translation is done. Easy, right? Well, not so fast. There are a few pitfalls newbies to webpage translation can easily avoid if they understand a little about how languages (in general) and translation companies actually work. Here’s some advice that should help you out.
Pinterest is having a difficult time growing its business internationally. Valued at $11 billion, the startup is one of the few prominent tech companies that was able to overcome the struggles of an unpredictable global economy. This accomplishment is impressive, considering that the business is only six years old. To cater to global markets, the startup opened offices in London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and São Paulo.
As the cost of education continues to skyrocket in the U.S., many in government and public sectors are looking for ways to lower these costs while maintaining and improving the value and quality of educational services. With the advent of broadband and lower costs of multimedia productions, eLearning content has exploded over the internet and is finding its way now worldwide. But in an effort to lower costs, don’t loose sight of what is important! Below are three companies that are pushing the boundaries of their products through 
Localization and manufacturing translation services require a strong sense of urgency, especially in highly competitive markets. An example of a brand that is leveraging the power of localization to streamline its offerings in a foreign region is BMW.
A brand’s value in today’s constantly changing world is proving to be more important than ever. Brand managers in many sectors are flexing muscle overseas to appeal to worldwide consumers and grow revenues. But they are quickly realizing their brands limitations without proper localization. The growing popularity of the digital buying process hence propelled marketing translation to play a vital role in online businesses.
Localization is an ongoing process requiring growing yearly budgets. When it comes to hiring a website translation service, many businesses take part in the process once and fail to revisit the service again when they need it. Establishments in fast-moving sectors, where rapid development and innovation is the norm, may require such service more often than they think. An example of this is the banking and payments industry.
If your business isn’t growing locally, it might be time to consider international regions. In 2007, US-based businesses sold over $1.1 trillion in goods to overseas customers. Today, that figure has nearly tripled due to the availability of e-commerce tools and low entry requirements set by fast-moving countries, such as United Arab Emirates, India and Brazil.
One of the main takeaways from Wal-Mart’s international struggles is that localization is not a silver bullet. Having what the average company considers unlimited resources is also no guarantee for success! Without a comprehensive plan to identify, evaluate and validate markets, penetration remains elusive. “When you build a castle you build the foundation first. Wal-Mart did it in reverse in Brazil,” explained a former Wal-Mart senior executive. “It is so hard to build a national chain when your system backbone is not in place.”
Expanding your online presence through SEO (search engine optimization) can be a painstaking process when you’re catering to different cultures and languages. New trends in SEO goes beyond using the built-in translation feature in your browser. Directly translated keywords can only get you so far; and to really penetrate the market you need to incorporate a strong localization strategy.
