In a recent period of plunging stock markets, stalwart banks folding overnight and exchange rates flipping from one extreme to the other, finance, management and marketing professionals all over the world are reviewing their marketing cost structures. For the best-organised and most future-ready few among them, this process already began years ago, and they are the ones best prepared to evolve, continue and profit.
But what does organised and future-ready mean? For some, this will include shifting marketing supports from material to digital, from TV to Internet, etc. For many, part of what it means is the capacity to shift client targets and outsourcers according to movements in markets, demand, currency values and flows, and pre-preparedness in terms of localisation.
The problem with market localisation, i.e. targeting a foreign market or culture, is that being prepared often means going back to the beginning of the communication process, for the product, the service, and even for the company itself, from the initial concept through the various supports to advertising, buzzes and re-localised personnel and sub-contractor documentation.
An ideal example is the snappy company website created for a French market, a few years ago, updated with rich content, good forms & interactivity, Flash animation, video, 3D, & other Rich Media… And then, having grown well, they decide to take that big leap into the American market – ship out the site and the supports to a translation agency, integrate the translated pages into the same website & Bob’s your American uncle.
So how do you translate a Rich media, Web 2.0 website? Ask the website designers. If they really can’t be bothered they will just ask the translators to “translate the site”. If they think they’re clever, they’ll list the terms and phrases they want translated, which they can reintegrate into the “en” site later.
Both of these are guaranteed to produce catastrophic results.
There is a lot more to translating and localising a text/image/audio/video/regional message than throwing a dictionary at it. Ever thought how you translate the US “$” sign from American English into French? Silly question. It’s the same, of course.
Is it? You’d be surprised. But a typical web designer would assume it is, so would not allow for it to be translated. Similarly with numbers. “29,000” is not the same amount in some other languages. And even if the numerous idiosyncrasies in syntax and grammar are taken into account, what about the next step? Chinese? Arabic?
The bottom line is, start at the top line, at the beginning of your communication project. Consult your language/localisation specialists about multilingual compatibility at the beginning of the project, not as some afterthought to be added in a few days once it’s all complete. Before even moving to a single other language, good foresight and adaptability in terms of eventual localisation will depend on the entire architecture of your site being designed accordingly.
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