Globalising the message
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Maintaining a truly global web presence is a major linguistic challenge but also presents an unequalled business opportunity, says Kenny MacIver.
Language is a subtle business. The English idiom, 'out of sight, out of mind', for example, is rendered as 'stemming from sight, outside brains' when passed into Chinese and back via a machine-based translation website such as Babelfish. 'Proceed to check out' becomes 'carries on to inspects.'
Those kinds of tools are not going to be a lot of help to organisations trying to ensure their web sites address different nationalities in their native languages - or at least one they understand. But few organisations can afford to have banks of translators on hand to constantly work through changes to web pages.
As our cover story, 'Lost in translation', highlights, creating and maintaining a truly multi-lingual web presence is a major undertaking that optimises the use of technology and process to minimise human resources expenditure.
To see the scale of the problem, just look at the recent merger between US telecoms providers AT&T and SBC Communications. The resultant re-branding around the AT&T name has included changing 50,000 company vehicles, more than 6,000 company buildings, 40,000 uniforms and hard hats, 30 million customer bills - and of course, the contents of all of the company's websites.
With offices in 31 countries across the globe, AT&T now offers nine different language versions of its web pages. That could mean a vast translation job involving hundreds of thousands of web pages. Increasingly, businesses are finding ways to reduce such vast translation costs. Globalisation service providers bring greater efficiency to the process through the marriage of technology and human translation.
Computer translation may not be able to deal with complex idioms yet, but technologies such as translation memory and terminology management, coupled with workflow and process management, are automating large parts of the translation process.
For most companies, a single language web site is not an option. Hotel chain Best Western, for example, believes it gains huge competitive edge by offering information and transaction facilities for all of its 4,000 affiliate hotels in seven languages other than English. Ensuring the 4 million words for each is translated accurately may be a major overhead that needs to managed efficiently but it presents an unequalled business opportunity.
