Did you know that if your website is published in 13 languages – English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese (People’s Republic of China), Japanese, German, Arabic, French, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Traditional Chinese (Taiwan and the islands), and Turkish – you can target 80% of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) producers?
More and more companies are now using the web as a primary inbound lead generation medium. This trend will accelerate in these difficult economic times as companies look to reduce costs and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.
During a relatively quiet week in August we received the following email from a prospective client: “Please contact us again in November of this year. We are currently rebuilding our site and are not yet ready to speak to a translation service. However our goal is to have our site in multiple languages shortly after the release of the source.”The person that sent the email is to be commended for committing to the goal of having her company’s website localized into multiple languages.
Translation Management Systems (TMS) are designed to host and facilitate localization and translation projects for all stakeholders– clients, translators, localizers, vendors and partners. They give users secure 24/7 access to project information and assets via a simple web browser and preferably require no software or administrative tasks from its users.
We’ve all been to our neighborhood Chinese restaurant where the proprietor welcomed us warmly and handed us the menu wishing us an enjoyable meal. Imagine her greeting you in Chinese and handing you a Chinese-only menu. Then when you inquire about the English menu, they respond to you in Chinese. Would you stay? Would you come back again? That may strike you as odd and unlikely to happen. But we do it to our clients all the time.
Web 2.0 technologies are becoming prevalent everywhere we look on the web. More people are blogging, more are joining social networks, more companies are building online communities, more corporate executives are embracing the potential that Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) and other marketing and sales channels on the web are achieving or promising.
For many companies justifying localization costs seems like a Catch-22 dilemma. They know that if they localize their product or website they will get more interest from their international users, but they cannot justify localization and support costs till interest in these markets pick up.
Westborough, MA, February 22, 2008 – GlobalVision International, Inc., a specialist in localization and translation services, announced today the availability of two free white papers, Going Global on a Shoestring and Search-Engine Geo-Optimization.
Companies with search engine-optimized websites are increasingly awakening to the fact that the language of business is the language of the customer. As a result, they are undertaking the effort and expense of converting their websites, along with their products and literature, into the languages most used by their prospects and clients.
As more and more companies awake to the fact that the language of business is the language of the customer, they are undertaking the effort and expense to convert their products, websites and collateral into the languages most used by their prospects and clients.
Many companies today are using AdWords with Google or other search engines to promote their products, generate traffic for their websites and increase online transactions in form of sales or sales leads.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, there are currently 10 languages used by roughly 81% of the 1.05 billion worldwide internet users. These languages, in descending order, are English (30%); Chinese (13.8%); Japanese (8.3%); Spanish (7.5%); German (5.6%); French (4.4%); Korean (3.2%); Portuguese (3.1%); Italian (2.8%); and Russian (2.3%).
