Going Global – Why You Should Create Multilingual Content

As a company owner growing your business is essential, keeping in mind the cost / profit ratio and making sure the costs do not surpass the profit. Especially small and mid-size company managers are struggling with such issues and are hesitant to invest into new markets easily. But many firms overestimate the costs or are unfamiliar with globalization and how globalization can help you grow our business.

Globalization in the 21st Century

  The 21st century has opened the doors to Globalization, with higher internet speeds than ever, reaching international consumers, and has helped many to develop new markets and win a larger market share. However, the challenges company owners or business managers are struggling with is also real.  Globalization is a chance at business growth, if you know how to maneuver your company through it and strategize correctly.   

      
Going global does not necessarily mean investing in offices onsite in new markets, this concept has been obsolete since the markets are opening up, cross-country trade has become a normality and the consumers have adapted e-commerce as a new way of shopping.

  
Cross-Country Shopping

    

    
Companies can now reach their consumers by means of Internet and through ever-growing online and e-commerce solutions. It has become normal to consumers to shop in other countries, meaning U.S. consumers are on shopping rampages in China, and international crowds developed to go on online cross-country shopping tours.

Native Language Shopping Experience

   

    

A clear strategy to be successful in going global online is to create a comfortable consumer experience. This means foremost that the consumers want to shop similar to what they are used to, and this also includes that the e-commerce or online shop solution they visit and where the company is offering their goods or services, needs to be in their mother tongue language. A research publically available in the internet shows that 72.4 of consumers were more likely to buy products in their native language.

   

Multilingual Content Creation

    
But how does this knowledge help a company´s business to accelerate? There is a huge cross-border market available. Getting a share of this market means the company selling products or services needs to create a comfortable environment for the consumer during their shopping experience, including a native language shopping experience. This means that translating and localizing content will already help in attracting more consumers from other markets! Language localization is the process of adapting a product that has been previously translated into multiple languages to a specific country or region.

     

Content Selection and Translation

    
Therefore, as a first step, the content of the website / online or e-commerce shop needs to be selected and then translated into the language for the target audience, including adaption of links, payment processes, and more.
Now many companies use different e-commerce providers or even had their IT division tailor their own e-commerce shop or online solution. Exporting such texts into a format that can be translated easily such as Microsoft´s MS Word might be a time consuming and costly aspect, and importing it back even worse, as your IT expert might need to copy and paste Chinese characters, Arabic text or other foreign language that he is unfamiliar with into your source code, meaning a lot of small and big mishaps can occur.

A reliable multilingual language supplier will offer you for this a more sophisticated solution. Professional multilingual language suppliers, including Wagner Consulting, will offer you the translation, localization and testing directly in the Content Management System your company has in place for your online solution or e-commerce shop; or will work directly in the source code and return to you a ready-to-use solution. Additional information about how e.g. Wagner Consulting´s Localization Solution is handled can be obtained here.

    

Culturally Adapting To Target Market

    
A common mistake made by many companies going global is their belief that their marketing style, text style and slogans can work in other countries as well. However, different cultures adapt words, phrases and meanings in various ways and this should be taken into consideration by your multilingual language supplier, who will adapt your text to local needs and consults you if necessary on issues you might not see.
Adapting to local needs is crucial at this point, as you want to sell your products and services to that target consumer. Losing their trust by not creating the comfortable environment they expect, can cause a low or no sale at all. Here are  put together a few translation mishaps that happened publically and should show you why working with a professional multilingual language service provider is important.

    

INSIDE LOOK: PE Solutions for Large Scale Content Companies

    
Certainly larger firms have their own solutions for content development and translation in place, or use Wagner Consulting´s solution to process content and have it go live automatically through a translation interface.

But what happens if you are a large corporation and process millions of words each day or week, or are a portal like eBay who have millions of users publish content each minute into their platform?
In that case a possible solution is post-editing (PE) machine translated content. Many large scale corporations, including eBay are already doing this and the outcome is of a level that a target audience speaker does not or rarely sees the difference between a human translation and a post-edited machine-translation. Certainly – this applies only to very simple texts and the industries technology level is not yet so far advanced, so that MT solutions can be applied to any translation request.

Wagner´s staff recently joined a Webinar held by GALA – the Globalization and Localization Association – about Language Resources for MT Quality Assurance at eBay. It was very interesting to hear their Quality Assurance approach and learn more about the tools eBay is using, and in many ways they use similar approaches as the solution Wagner Consulting provides, including the use of similar software tools and systems.
PE Solutions are only advisable to be used large-scale clients and for non-crucial content.

Roll-Out

    

    
Once your content has been fully localized, Quality Assurance took place and the website has been tested, you can publically roll-out your content and make it available to your target consumers.

  Increase in Revenue

     

   

    
Congratulations, you have done the first step in Globalization. But now think about the following – you have an awesome product or service, made it appealing looking and many consumers would be interesting in acquiring it, but you hide it in your drawer. Will you be able to actually sell it that way? Well no you will think, and this is similar to going global. A local presence in form of an online solution or e-commerce shop will not succeed, until you introduce it to the target audience and make them aware of your product or service.

A professional multilingual language supplier such as Wagner Consulting will not stop here, but will consult and guide you further about how to proceed with the Globalization process and how to turn your multilingual content to work for you and generate profit.

    
Ongoing Support by Wagner

     

    
This means your products and services will be publically found by your target audience. Globalization is an ongoing process that needs continuous support and work. Similar to your existing Sales and Marketing activities, so does your Globalization approach also need resilience and passion. Among such efforts it´s important to provide fresh and unique content to your target audience on an ongoing basis. According to Forbes 88 % of shoppers characterize detailed product content as being extremely important.

Wagner Consulting is one of the best online translation agencies that provides professional Translation, Globalization & Localization services to a large local and foreign customer base.

If you wish to receive a detailed offer on or consultation on Globalization or Localization services provided by Wagner Consulting, then please feel free to contact our Sales Team, who will gladly assist you.