You are not going to want to sell U.S. triple crème brie in France," says Don DePalma, vice president of corporate strategy at Idiom, a globalization and e-business firm. This may seem like an elementary truth; but when you’re getting ready to take your company Web site global, such small cultural considerations can really add up.

Expanding your Internet communication strategy to include a global audience may begin with translating the language of the site, but translation isn’t the only consideration. While your site is accessible internationally, that doesn’t mean it’s localized to diverse foreign markets. The key to localization, of course, is language translation; but design elements, pricing and payment infrastructures, currency translation and customer support all share a role in delivering a seamless Web experience to the end user. "User or customer satisfaction is measured in nanoseconds. With a Web site, you need eyeballs to get there and stay there. But you cannot force the user to do that," says Michael Dortch, an analyst with the Robert Frances Group. "You can only persuade them."

And reaching the most users possible is the primary motivation for going global. According to IDC, a research firm in Framingham, Mass., more than 50% of the 147 million Web users today are non-English speakers; and by 2003, 60% of the one billion Internet users will be non-English speakers.

"The notion that the World Wide Web caters to mostly English speaking people is a contradiction in and of itself," says DePalma, formerly an analyst with Forrester Research. He sees globalization as the only decision for businesses wanting to reach a market beyond North America. Paraphrasing a report from the Gartner Group, DePalma says by 2002 "e-business" will die, meaning that all businesses will be on the Web so there will no longer be the need to make a distinction between traditional and online businesses.

To stay competitive, according to Dortch, every company will need to serve the international market, to which all e-businesses have access. And to truly compete on the global scene, he adds, their Web sites must be localized–which goes beyond translating languages to adapting all content to meet cultural standards.

Site Customization

From locale to locale, the amount of customization needed will vary. For example, an American company trying to reach an Asian marketplace may need more specific localization than if the company were trying to reach, say, a European country with more Western influences.

"Our research in Korea showed that if the services are not in the local languages, they will not be used," says Alison Toon, worldwide localization program manager for Hewlett-Packard’s IT Resource Center. In such a case, "less than 5% of our customers would be happy using our services."

Toon quickly learned that "business in English-only is just not acceptable" in certain markets. But because HP is already well-entrenched in the Japanese market, Toon targeted Japan as her first globalization priority. According to analysis performed by the company, HP needed to deliver its online service to the Japanese market quickly because of its huge customer base there.

In order to launch HP’s service Web site for IT professionals first in Japan, then in Germany, Korea and Taiwan, Toon worked with Uniscape, an application service provider (ASP) that has developed a set of services and tools to create global Web sites.

What was most important to Toon in finding an ASP was the opportunity to own HP’s data repository–the database in which all the company’s previously translated material and the glossary of its frequently used text is stored. This means that even if HP were no longer working with the translation ASP, HP would still retain ownership of all that translated information to assist with future translation projects.

According to Toon, much of the material that is used on Web sites is repeated information. Plus, HP sometimes uses the online material for brochures, e-mails and letters to customers. Fortunately, Uniscape had a central translation memory product that enabled previously translated material to be ‘reused’ during the translation process

"We have HP people in a lot of countries; we wanted to make sure the same technology and language that was used in our support centers was used online and in our print products," she says. "We wanted to take advantage of everything we were translating and make sure it belonged to HP."

The globalization process Uniscape uses begins with the client, who can either outsource all the material to the company, download Uniscape’s translation software from the Web or have the translation software on the translators’ desktops, according to Howard Schwartz, vice president of marketing at Uniscape. While translators are working, the software will suggest possible translation based on its multilingual knowledge repository that identifies exact text or recognizes similar phrases through a matching process. "Depending on the revisions, the client can see from 20% to 90% reuse," says Jim Owens, director of corporate communications for Uniscape.

But you cannot eliminate the human element when dealing with language translation. "Machine translation is only about 60% accurate, and when you are looking at something that is representing your company, you want to do better than that," Owens adds.

Dortch says that effective globalization requires two things: familiarity with the technology that supports the Web site, and knowledge of translating from one language to another. That’s why native-language, in-country translators are often a must, HP’s Toon explains. "It’s a fallacy to think all IT professionals speak English. If you only speak English, you will only get a certain distance, even on the Web." Toon was able to use the Uniscape process with her existing translation vendors, but if you don’t have a foot in foreign markets you could take advantage of the translation services offered through Uniscape.

For example, when Nutrilite wanted to post its site in Asia, it used Uniscape’s in-country translators, according to Neal Mercado, programs marketer for brand Web sites at Nutrilite. He says the company, a multivitamin distributor and division of Amway, has its own translators in-house, but it needed Uniscape’s extra in-country translation support.

"We don’t have a fixed support unit in place around the world to deal with Web site translations," Mercado says. Pushing its already popular product line in the local language has paid off for Nutrilite, which launched its Korean site in October 1999.

"At the very least, it creates a global view of our brand," Mercado says. But in quantitative terms, the site has had a 30% increase in hits, "so that’s definitely being used more and that’s a good thing for us."

Overcoming Obstacles

Anyone taking a Web site to a global level must be aware that there are potential technical problems related to translation, mostly in programming and design. HTML makes it difficult for language translators to get to the company material because the content must be extracted from the complex markup language.

With headquarters in San Francisco and offices around the world, Web globalization solution provider eTranslate uses a workflow system that addresses the HTML problem. ETranslate’s system takes the entire page in HTML, extracts the content to be translated and distributes it to the necessary people. After final approval of the material, the system reinserts it into HTML. According to Charlie Baxter, the company’s president and CEO, eTranslate is also about providing clients with the "look and feel and meaning necessary to target local users"–in other words, eTranslate focuses on both the content and the context of the language.

Also, Baxter says, with different languages a system may require different configurations. For example, in Asia the characters used in the local languages need to be expressed in a double-bit format, rather than a single-bit format that works for English and European languages. Another technical obstacle is something called "text swell." This deals with the length of words and the actual space allotted to textual content on a Web site.

"Because German words use more characters than English words, they run right off the navigation bar on a Web site. It takes 30% to 40% more space per page for a German site," Baxter explains. "It ruins the entire interface and throws off page layouts. A very basic thing can create a graphics mess." Hence, eTranslate provides on-site localization engineers, trained in the technical aspects of Web sites, who can lessen the effort that it takes to globalize.

Of course, even the most technically savvy ASPs still have some logistical kinks to work out. One of eTranslate's clients, Quokka Sports, had journalists in New Zealand covering the America’s Cup 2000 races every day. The articles were translated into Spanish, German and Italian in an "extremely fast" four-hour time frame to be posted on Yahoo and other sites. With time difference created by the span of the globe and all the time zones, some translators literally read the future for viewers in later-zoned countries.

Anecdotes like this hint at the currently complex nature of the globalization process. But even with all of translation’s minor concerns, the evidence indicates that it may be wiser for Web sites to start translating now, in the most localized manner possible, before the international market gets swept up into someone else’s hands.

Denise Dubie is a freelance writer based in Newton, Mass.