The Face of Change

As Web globalization service providers, we help our clients to visualize the face of their audience in their respective locales and to understand what it takes to spread a smile—that universal symbol of satisfaction—across that face.

Our job is to provide the cultural gateway to the best that technology has to offer on the Web. Today, a single Web site can tear down borders, wipe out geography, and eliminate time zones. It serves as an instantly accessible portal for the global exportation of goods and services.

Now put up a language barrier or content that is culturally offensive. You have just tripped over the most binding link in the evolutionary chain of commercial and communication technology—cultural connectivity. The visitor has just clicked out of your site.

Global Web Sites as Communities

There are two inherent cultures on any multilingual Web site. One is the global, or corporate content that creates the macro framework through branding, terminology, or look and feel that reflects the corporate culture. The second is the micro-culture of the adapted local market content, features, and functionality. It is this micro-culture that makes a difference in terms of a Web site’s impact and profitability—and the aspect that requires the most planning.

As Forrester Research reports, business users on the Web are three times more likely to purchase when addressed in their native language. The only way to successfully create a sound and scalable foundation for a multilingual Web site is through a comprehensive globalization strategy that encompasses every aspect of Web design, content, and technology. Localization alone is not sufficient.

From branding to look and feel, translation memory to content management schema, and language selection to locale definition, Web globalization requires a great deal of forethought and planning to ensure the delivery of a Web site that will be able to achieve maximum sustainable revenue performance. The planning begins with analysis, training, and strategy at the earliest phases of the concept development.

Interfacing within the Core

The Web industry is requiring us to look at new ways to extend our skills set and collaborate with client teams. In developing a global ecommerce strategy we find ourselves looking for alliances to answer tough questions about the legal issues of international transactions on the Web. To accomplish this, we collaborate with in-country legal advisors.

Clients also want to know about browser behavior in foreign markets. Secondary market research and case studies are becoming tools that we frequently rely upon to answer these requests.

Domain name selection, as it applies in the intended locales, is not something that we typically handle. But we are frequently asked “How do I register this name in the foreign search engines, do I have to globalize this brand?” We must be prepared to offer solutions.

Creative agencies look to us to develop information about the cultural issues behind color selection when designing Web pages. Some issues concerning color are cultural; others are influenced by fashion and trends. What does color selection have to do with fuzzy matches and leveraging terminology?

Our bookshelves are filling up with books on business etiquette and design concepts where we once had mainly translation dictionaries.

Bonding with Change

In order to help clients even begin the strategy development process, we encourage them to think about performing a Web site audit, technical environment evaluation, needs analysis, or possibly an end user usability test. We sit with them as they prototype site architectures to ensure that they are designing with globalization in mind. Making recommendations for an automated workflow process and developing a streaming update schedule are suddenly phrases we hear ourselves saying where we once focused mostly on the actual localization of a project.

And this is just the beginning. Where Web sites must evolve quickly, we cooperate to identify the past state and innovate new ideas and tools into the present state in order to help clients prepare to integrate the best available solutions into the future state of their sites. The nature of the Web is iterative, organic, and highly evolving and we maintain our partnerships throughout the diverse phases of development and deployment.

In an effort to continuously extend value to our client’s products by localizing them into multiple foreign markets in a timely manner, we take advantage of the momentum of the evolution of technology. Always pulling us closer to the core of product design and development, technology is the vehicle we use to haul our wares. Streamlining the process and crafting the sequencing of events is the fuel that drives our innovation.

Evolution: Linear to Circular

However, we can no longer plot a linear path as with software localization. Historically, localization has occurred downstream from the concept creation and development of the source product. As the demands for time to market continuously shorten, localization leaders have had to become process scientists.

To extend the life span of our client’s products in the marketplace, we have engineered processes to enable simultaneous synchronous release of multilingual versions with the source product. We created the craft of internationalization as a means of preparing the foundation for sound localization of text, media assets, input forms, and programming of code, with the greatest attention being paid to making the UI fully international and local. All the while, the localization industry has benefi ted from capturing these efficiencies and incorporating them into process workflow, version control, and project architecting.

Perhaps more provocative are the lessons learned concerning product design and development from the monocle of 20/20 hindsight. Anticipating problems overtook troubleshooting to the extent that we have devised methodologies to maximize planning of the design, content, and technology. Yet, as always, the measurement of success is how we avoid the “X” factor, exponential expense through multilingual release of the same error. Web sites reflect the care and foresight of the designers by an exponential factor of action multiplied by number of target markets, immediately. The value of each word, image, feature, or aspect of functionality is multiplied by the number of target markets, in real time, whether good or bad. Planning is of the essence for success.

Maximum Benefit

From this perspective, localization companies are finding themselves in an auspicious, dynamic role in industry. Past experience in downstream and after-market development now catapults us into the spotlight of global business strategy. We now are bonding from the core of product development and strategic planning. It doesn’t happen overnight, but as the efficiencies make themselves apparent, logic prevails and we are asked more and more for training and solutions during strategy development.

Competition today not only takes place between products, but ultimately between business models. Irrelevancy is a bigger risk than inefficiency, and keeping pace with e-business services is changing our business models. By gathering our cultural knowledge and process agility into training curriculum and consulting services, we are now poised to launch into the new industrial order through the cultural heart of the World Wide Web.

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Edie Petrachi
Global Web Strategist/Product Developer,
Master Series
Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.
492 Old Connecticut Path
Framingham, Ma 01710
USA
Tel.: +1 (508) 620 - 3900, ext. 316
Fax: +1 (508) 620 - 3999
E-mail: epetrachi@intl.com