Global Business Practices Survey 2006

• Confirm where other companies are placing their global business priorities, and leverage this information as a baseline for comparison.
• Use the data to determine the exact skill set needed by your global team to be successful – including the key qualities/expertise required by global managers who are opening new markets.
• Learn who is paying for what globalization services, and how much they are paying.
• Find out exactly what types of international business consulting services that companies require and the profiles of their preferred service providers for these services.

Focusing on both those in charge of determining overall globalization strategy and those who actually implement these strategies, the Global Business Practices Report provides a clearer picture of the globalization landscape. Among key findings of the survey are:

• Most companies doing international business purchase some sort of international business consulting services (Figure 1 above). The survey report details those business areas in which translation and localization companies are the most likely to successfully compete for consulting projects.
• Although in-house translation departments are supposed to be a thing of the past, content producers still tend to use two business models to meet their translation needs: (1) total outsourcing and (2) heavy use of in-house translators (Figure 2).

• The survey determined the average price paid to free-lance translators for thirteen key language pairs, with English → Japanese the most expensive and English → Arabic the least. (Specific information on prices is available in the report.)
• Staff resistance to change is a factor that complicates roughly half of all technology implementation projects and severely threatens about one in ten (Figure 3).