Two weeks ago, the stork dropped its sixth billionth baby onto the earth - in Sarajevo. It's a big world out there, but Web marketers are realizing that if they want to reach that baby, they'd better start brushing up on their Yugoslavian.
Companies like eBay, Amazon.com and Motorola are among those expanding their Anglo-centric sites to accommodate multilingual audiences around the globe.
And so should you. Besides the glamour of being the first on your block to have a site written in funky-looking characters, pages that speak in tongues cater to very specific demographics and can increase profit margins, for there are 77.9 million online users who do not speak English.
"If you start doing demographics in terms of how many people within a certain [language] group who buy products in the $50, $500, and $1,000 range," says Robert Mandell, regional manager for ITP, a localization consulting group, "it could add up to 5% of a $100 million market. To a company, missing that $5 million is significant."
In short, companies maintaining language barriers are doing their own products a disservice. "Today people all over the world are in search of information in their own language," says Heidi Lasker, of the PR firm Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products-USA.
Speaking to those people in their own tongue gives you an edge. "Let's say your site competes against another and both cater to Japan," says Mandell. "If theirs is in English and yours is translated into Japanese, users are going to automatically assume that yours is much more relevant, authentic and understands the needs of the people because it's put into their own language."
Unless it offends them.
Talk Their Talk
When Web communicators feign cultural fluency without doing their homework, the results can be fatal. Translating a site directly from its English origin is not enough.
"Tonality offends," says John Steere, CEO and chief cultural officer of yet another localization firm called Cyverasia.com. "The tone and the feel needs to be a bit more respectful as opposed to the West where we are used to the hard sale. That doesn't work in Asian cultures. Americans will say 'Buy now $9.95.' Asians say, 'Educate me first then let me decide myself if I want to buy.'"
Content should also read naturally. To do this the writer must understand the target culture's history, psychology and sociology.
"It's not just a translation job," says Steere. "Most cultures can tell if you have just translated something. It's very cryptic, like a 'see spot run' type of language."
To avoid reading like an elementary school book, Mandell suggests a few pointers:
- Be aware of using religious symbols or references.
- Make sure that pictures and icons are universally recognizable.
- If you're portraying men and women make sure the gender is appropriate for the target culture.
- Be sure that gestures and images of the body and the human intellect are appropriate.
- Be careful of using animal or animal cartoons.
- Recognize the difference of weights and measures, postal addresses, telephone numbers.
- Accommodate for various standard sizes of paper and envelopes.
Keeping sites unabrasive involves hiring someone who knows the culture, i.e., someone who lives there.
"The way a localization company knows the culture is by hiring all the translation to be done in country," says Mandell. "Someone who has lived in the U.S. for the last 10 years and speaks Italian won't understand exactly what has been happening over in Italy. It could be a political thing. A cultural thing. They're just out of touch with their past culture."
Po-tay-toe, Po-tah-toe
Although the design differences between a single language site and multi-language site are slight, they are worth mentioning.
First off, multilingual sites tend to use more art and symbols. These go a long way in making points easier to understand. But they often require some mammoth redesign when it comes to translation, which brings up point number two.
Sites are built using many designers. It's not one guy gazing into a terminal screen with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. It's a whole slew of them.
Point three. Our 26-character alphabet doesn't always translate seamlessly into Japanese, Korean or even German.
A page of English may translate into a page and a half in other languages. This makes is more of a challege for designers to build a user-friendly interface when they're trying to cram everything to fit into the screen.
The last point to consider is customer service. Any Web site worth its weight in gold has a support team, and the ones that cater to a different language better have staffers who speak that language. Capice?
(Heidi Lasker, 781/203-5258, [email protected], Robert Mendall, 650/635-0355, [email protected], John Steere, 212/685-2180, [email protected].)