Newsletter - Events
IQPC Web Globalization Conference, May 2006
Evan Norman, McElroy Translation
Smart global companies know that their brands, the supporting content and media, and the way that customers and prospective buyers experience their brands must be conceived and managed with an entirely global perspective.
This may seem like an overly pedestrian statement to anyone who claims to have the least bit of business sense. However, the reality is that many organizations manage the needs of global buyers reactively rather than proactively; likewise, their domestic market strategy is disproportionate to their global strategy, even when as much as half of the company's revenue comes from sales regions outside of North America. Everyone from the CEO to web development team members around the world has to re-align their strategies with a global brand mindset in order to effectively give their company a true global presence on the web. This was the common theme throughout many of the presentations at the IQPC Web Globalization Conference, “Implementing the Global Web Organization Process and Infrastructure to Optimize Brand Extension and Global Returns” (May 22-24, 2006 in San Diego).
There are, of course, dozens, if not hundreds, of obstacles along the way to making this happen. In many instances, an organization has done business overseas for many years, sometimes starting before the advent of the Internet, crafting the brand and its accompanying vision and mission statements in a completely U.S.-centric approach. This approach inevitably has led to the creation of dozens or more "rogue sites" (websites run by regional sales offices not authorized by the central corporate office). These rogue sites have evolved to provide content of their own in their native languages during the past ten or so years, leaving the corporate office faced with the challenge of re-establishing control of its own brand and message worldwide.
In a case study from Verisign, senior management knew that having the central corporate site in other languages seemed like a good idea, but they had no idea how much revenue outside the U.S. came from global buyers, nor were they ready or willing to do more than simply hire one person to handle the entire globalization of its company website. Several examples of metrical approaches were provided to help attendees receive not only verbal buy-in to globalize the website, but financial buy-in as well.
Presenting a brand to a global audience carries with it all of the expected, yet oft-overlooked, issues of user interfaces for global audiences, international SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and domain protection. Many international sites are being produced with little consideration given to how buyers in other countries will find the sites, either from search engines or from the main corporate home page. 10x Marketing's pre-conference workshop on international SEO and John Yunker's presentation on best practices for gateways to global websites contained practical tips on how to increase international visibility and usability. For example, after a company builds its preferred key search term list in English, multilingual tools (like those offered by Overture) coupled with the work of native translators should be used to determine what comparable multilingual key terms visitors use in their native languages to search for the company's product or service. This would be the starting point in forming the terminology glossary for translation of the web content.
Meanwhile, the push for automation continues to be a major topic of discussion among those who manage translation of global web content. Idiom's presentation addressed this, and the audience was quite impressed with the GMS (Globalization Management System) that was showcased, especially its ease of integration with existing content management models, and its use of a built-in TM (Translation Memory) tool. (As an aside, TM seemed to hold only a minor place in the hearts of the global website managers in attendance, while automation of the translation process was paramount.) In spite of automation being the Holy Grail for creating, managing, translating and updating content, many of the attendees complained about how their existing CMS/GMS integration strategies were weak. This was due to either the insistence of upper management that outmoded CMS tools be used, or due to the lack of a given CMS tool being capable of delivering what its salesperson initially had promised.
This spring’s conference illustrated how fundamental website globalization has become for many businesses, and how aligned it has to be with high-level corporate goals and visions. Almost every single presentation carried the phrase "global brand awareness", or some variation thereof, as a kind of mantra to explain what drives the need for website globalization. The technical nuts and bolts of handling a multiple language website will continue to play an important role in the discussion of website globalization, but the real focus has become that of making website globalization an integral factor in successful C-level corporate strategies—that is, as soon as these strategies include a global perspective
Editor’s Note: The next IQPC Web Globalization conference will take place November 28-30, 2006 in Boston.
Evan's background is in multimedia design, localization fundamentals and web programming. He's held the roles of Web Localization Specialist and Technical Sales Support for seven years at McElroy Translation. He can be reached at evan[at-NOSPAM]mcelroytranslation.