Answering the Need for Translation

The question: Should I translate my website and my marketing material? arises every time a company explores venturing into a new market. Is the cost of translating and localizing marketing collateral going to pay off with market share in the future? is another question that looms over the heads of International Sales people in their attempt to justify their translation budgets for their material. This article, written by Don DePalma, covers some important things to factor in when considering translating and localizing content from marketing collateral to user interfaces and online help. Here's an excerpt from the article that I think address the questions above. Read the full article here


Excerpt: Global Strategies: Watch Your Language

Written by Don DePalma

Monday, 01 June 2009

Buyers want products they can understand
This need to localize isn’t unique to consumer products; it crosses a wide range of goods and services. At Common Sense Advisory, we have long tracked this product requirement. In 2006, we asked 2,430 consumers in eight non-English-speaking countries about their language and usage preferences for Web sites. The answer was unequivocal: they wanted information, user interfaces, and payment methods that they could read, use, and understand, not English.

More recently, we extended this inquiry to corporate software buyers, both the kind you use on your desktop at work and the heavy-duty enterprise solutions that power supply chains, financial institutions, and corporate operations. This time, we asked 351 buyers in eight non-Anglophone countries about their buying preferences.

We think this survey has broader implications for global sales and should be interesting even if you don’t buy or sell software. Think about the things you do buy or sell. They are marketed either online, in-person, or in the mass media, so the marketers have to attract the prospective buyers’ attention in selling propositions that make sense to them.

Think office equipment, machine tools, anything you might drive or fly, medical devices, and a bunch of other gear. Then consider what makes up these products. Each has an electronic user interface, comes with lots of documentation, and may require post-sales technical support. In many ways, from initial marketing to post-sales support, these products are similar to software.

To measure the localization requirements for business products, we selected a cross-section of countries around the world, aiming for a representative mix of markets for which companies frequently adapt their products (France, Germany, Japan, and Spain), attractive developing markets (China and Russia), and locales for which English is often thought to be sufficient for most offerings (Sweden).

Global TM

This week ICD started tweeting, and we started to follow Renato Beninatto, famed translation industry expert and President of Common Sense Advisory. He tweeted about the future of the Global TM (Translation Memory). Basically, it's the idea of combining multiple translation memories from different vendors and create a shared TM. Access can be granted to both vendors and clients who agree to share their memories. Now, that sounds like it should bring about fair market competition between translation companies. For example: If translation company A and B are bidding on the same project they would have the same competitive edge when it comes to the translated content, but the winning bid would come down to the translators cost. That's when the problem arises for translators. The price war has already begun, and with a global TM, translators will have to beat each other based on prices because that becomes the sole variable for translation cost. Then the question of quality becomes an issue.

The other problem arises with proprietary content. TMs are the clients proprietary material, and if they entered into an agreement for a Global TM, then their translated materials would be shared with their competitors. I'm not sure how this will effect instruction manuals, but it could be a problem for marketing literature with catchy tag lines and phrases. You certainly don't want your prized tag line that your marketing gurus spent hours coming up with duplicated or beaten by a competing company. It only takes a couple words to have a best seller.

Will the Global TM succeed? Maybe, if limits are placed on the exchange of translated content, and on access provided to companies that agree to share their memories. Smaller translation companies will also feel the pain as they will be less competitive if they don't participate in the Global TM.