First U.S. companies learned that the Internet doesn't stop at the U.S. border. Next, they learned that English alone isn't good enough if you want to appeal to customers abroad. Now they're learning that, as inconvenient as it may be, translating website copy alone isn't enough.
AOL splashes images of Bollywood celebrities on its new home page for India. MySpace accepts sign-ups from mobile phones in Japan. Google departs from its customarily spartan home page and peppers its Korean site with colorful, animated icons...Companies are trying to expand globally without seeming to, designing market-specific services with customized features that reflect differences in connection speeds, payment options and attitudes toward sex or violence.
This Associate Press article today highlights how several companies have come to realize the need to not only perform a quality translation of their copy, but to truly localize their content, feature sets and more.
I recall one client I worked with several years ago. Their business involved awarding prizes to site members for participating in various surveys and other activities. They initially approached us with the intention of having us simply localize their content into Japanese. At our urging, the engagement was expanded to include a research phase up front to explore the appeal and even legality of their business model in Japan. It turned out to be a very wise move. The majority of prizes they were planning to offer simply didn't appeal to a Japanese audience, even though they were a huge hit in the U.S. More importantly, we learned that it was against the law to give cash prizes in Japan the size of those they were awarding in the U.S.—and had planned to offer there.
In the end, they adopted an entirely different brand in Japan, offered very different prizes, reduced the size of their cash prizes to adhere to Japanese law and much more. The Japanese entity went on to outlive it's U.S. parent and exceed all projections for revenue and success.
The AP article concludes:
"Creating a national company is like rocket science," said John Strand of Strand Consulting in Denmark. "But creating an international company is like proton physics."
While not easy by any means, I'd say this statement does a grave disservice to the robust language services industry and the many Internet professional services firms who, when empowered to help their clients succeed, have a very strong track record of doing exactly that.
An un-American feel aids expanding US Web firms :: The Associated Press
