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).

On the Floor

ICD has attended and exhibited at numerous trade shows, and I'm always interested in what the sales team has to say when they return from shows. I know that it can be quite grueling and frustrating when you get rejected, but there are some really interesting conversations that happen on the floor. It's interesting how little people know about the translation and localization industry. I for one never realized how big it was until I started working at ICD. Translations were always on the back burner for most companies. It's on the: "We'll deal with it when we have to" list. No preemptive measures were necessary when exploring a global market because there was no reason to assume that people needed to read and understand the content. Companies didn't care about that, and they figured their distributors, or in-country sales personnel would deal with it.

Well, things have changed, and in our declining economy, translations are not on the back burner. Companies are branching out and trying to increase sales in different markets. They are doing it cautiously though, so prices are an issue, and translation is not cheap. Naturally, they start thinking about translating some marketing material, but they are afraid of spending what little they have on German brochures or a website when they don't know if they can make any in-roads in that market. Is translation and localization a waste of money? That's a question VP's of sales have to ask themselves every time they are approached by a rep from a translation company. It's a risk, but you've got to start somewhere.