Multilingual Websites
The following article was published on the Financial Times website. Here you'll find some interesting insights on multilingual websites.
FTIT February 7 2001
Multilingual websites widen the way to a new online world
By Julian Perkin
Published: February 5 2001 09:53GMT | Last Updated: February 5 2001 16:19GMT
Anyone who surfs the net regularly could easily form the impression that nearly all the world speaks English. The language, it would seem, is fast becoming a lingua franca, with all the benefits this would bring for communication and understanding - and threats to cultural diversity and regional independence.
English is everywhere - in Hollywood films, on TV and in pop music. The vast majority of international conferences and communications for business, science, academia and other disciplines are in English. English is typically the language of people who either come from richer nations, or is the second language used by a wealthy and influential professional elite. Hence its dominance.
As a consequence, English documents pervade the internet. Statistics vary, but the estimates suggest that around three quarters of the pages on the worldwide web are in English. Yet only 5.4 per cent - little more than 1 in 20 - of the world's population have English as their mother tongue, according to IDC, the Boston-based IT market researchers. The majority of these are Americans. A further 7 per cent of the world's population are proficient English speakers, so the language is a good means of communication for around an eighth of the world's inhabitants.
There are fractionally more native Spanish speakers in the world, and the Chinese languages dwarf English as a native language, spoken by 20.7 per cent of the world population. Three-quarters of these, or 15 per cent of the world population, speak Mandarin alone - nearly three times as many people as have English as a first language.
The pre-eminence of English in other fields may be unassailable, but on the internet at least, its dominance is set to decline sharply as international internet access grows and more companies and institutions around the world put their information online and start to conduct e-business.
According to research by Steve McClure at IDC, growth in web usage and e-commerce in Europe and especially in Asia will outstrip that of the US by between two and five times over the next two to three years.
IDC surveys and data from Forrester, another IT market research group, also show, not surprisingly, that the vast majority of people prefer websites in their native language, especially for leisure activities such as online shopping. Moreover, they are more likely to buy things online if they can use their own language.
GlobalSight, a consultancy firm that advises organisations on internationalising websites, estimates that, by 2003, only one third of the projected 603m internet users will be English-speaking.
LeAnn Barber of Scient, an e-commerce consultancy, says: "There is an accelerating boot-strap effect, that is, as more content becomes available in a particular language, more people use the internet, and as more people use the internet, content producers are incentivised to use the internet as a medium."
Websites needed in many languages
Government and venture capitalist investment in infrastructure, she adds, will be required to break the cycle in which there is not enough content to attract users, and consequently not enough users to justify the creation of content.
Companies of any size wanting to leverage the internet to reach global markets, therefore, need to offer versions of their websites in each of the languages of their target markets. But Mr McClure says there is little response from those he has questioned in the US and Europe regarding their plans to make their sites multilingual.
Europe, he notes, has natural advantages over the US, since it has local linguistic skills and inherent cultural diversity. But there is little evidence that European businesses are turning this lead to their advantage.
This may be because the problems of maintaining a multilingual website are formidable.
Translation is just the starting point. Automated translation is available for free to individual web surfers, who can use it to get rough translations. But the quality, although improving, often yields laughable results and is no good for companies wishing to post alternative-language versions of their websites. So web pages have to be translated manually, or else automated translations must be reworked and polished by skilled translators.
Computers can play a valuable role in the overall translation process, providing, for example, online bilingual dictionaries, term banks and translation memories that scan databases of similar sentences that have been well-translated previously.
Once a website is translated into a number of languages, the web's interactive nature invites customers to respond with sales queries and support issues in their own language. Each of these needs to be dealt with in that language, requiring a large number of linguistically, as well as technically, skilled staff.
Sony, which operates websites in 14 languages to market and sell its consumer products such as laptops and memory sticks, is applying technology to automate some of this unwieldy problem. "Translating and localising the website is the easy bit," says Paul Johns, marketing director for Europe, Middle East and Asia at Broadbase (formerly Servicesoft), the company employed by Sony to handle as many queries as possible without human intervention. This is known as multilingual auto-response.
Mr Johns reckons that "80 per cent of all inbound queries to a call centre or website can be dealt with through about 20 answers." The problem is that these 80 per cent of questions can be stated in a myriad ways. And in an appropriate style. Emma Naismith, marketing director at Los Angeles-based Bowne Global Solutions, says prices need to be expressed in the local currency, dates must be in the right format, and weights and measures should be familiar.
Colours and images may need to be altered as they can convey different implications or simply work better in some countries than in others. Black is seen as the sombre colour of mourning in many cultures, but white conveys the same in other countries. A thumbs-up or the showing of palms through a wave can have the opposite of the desired effect.
Some images - especially those symbolic of national pride or patriotism - need to be switched. Graphics may support slogans or captions that contain plays on words that make no sense after translation. Ms Naismith gives this example: "A German ad for a bank shows mice sitting on some coins. The text below the picture reads 'Hier konnen Sie Ihre Mause anlegen', which translates into English as 'Here you can bring your mice'...I n German, 'Mause' ('mice') is a slang word for money...this graphic [as well as the text] would have to be changed for different readerships."
Culture can also influence the design and operations of a website. In Japan, where people are uneasy about giving their credit card details over the web, internet sales processes have to be changed to enable customers to order online, and pick up their goods from a local store or collection point.
In Switzerland and Korea, putting an X in a box -a common technique on web pages for selecting items from a list - suggests that the items should be excluded rather than included. There are also legal and taxation issues that need to be addressed to do business, including e-business, in different countries.
Risk of detering online customers
A good multilingual website will need to be designed well so that, for example, links from Spanish pages always lead to other Spanish pages, these being logical, consistent and faithful translations of the original site.
Some multilingual sites revert to a base language, usually English, when no translated page is available. This risks putting off customers. At the very least, a warning message should be displayed giving them the choice to continue, or quit, or perhaps use a rough automatic translation tool.
From the company's point of view, keeping all the translated pages on the website updated and consistent is a significant challenge. SDL International is one example of a company that is integrating translation memory and work flow tools with standard content management systems from Vignette and Interwoven to provide the necessary multilingual content management.
"Efficiency gains are considerable," says Mark Lancaster, SDL's chief executive. "You wouldn't even attempt these tasks without translation memories and multilingual content management. We are typically seeing 80 per cent gains in speed and 60 per cent gains in cost. And a change to a translated sentence or paragraph on website, including checking in context by a human translator, can be turned around in 10 minutes or half an hour. With manual processes this would have taken between a day and a week."
We cannot expect everything on the web to be available in every language any time soon. The internet started life as a rich archive of references, research and academic papers before it came to be thought of as the platform for e-business.
This enormous virtual library remains in place. Without automated translation of a far superior quality than is currently available, this material is far too voluminous and complex to be translated. At the same time, scientific documents, political and legal papers, newspapers and the like are continually being added in languages other than English at a tremendous rate.
Translations into English may therefore become increasingly important. As ad hoc translations are made, vast translation memories may come to the fore. It should become an important principle that manual translations, and computer-assisted translations that are polished by a human translator, should not be lost so that they can be recognised and offered again.
Colossal challenge
The technical and organisational challenges of managing this process effectively will be a mammoth task. It could be something that is built into a future version of the web. There may in the future be opportunities partially to reimburse the person or organisation that originally made, or footed the bill for, a translation each time it is re-used.
Research from Merrill Lynch suggests that only about 10 per cent of companies that trade across borders on the web have any serious plans for co-ordinating and maintaining their websites across multiple languages.
Perhaps large companies are not best placed to penetrate international markets. Local companies which need operate only in the language of the target market and have a full grasp of cultural issues will have advantages that may give them a strong lead.
It is not difficult to copy the best ideas in e-commerce - such as flight and holiday sales, sales of books and music, auctions and electronic marketplaces - and to establish local language and culturally appropriate versions.
There will be many exceptions where strong companies have products, technology or information that is uniquely available from them - Sony PlayStation games, for example - or where sheer financial muscle enables them to provide more competitive financial products such as insurance.
But the barriers of language and of culture may well put a brake on the ability of corporations to expand unchecked, while also offering much-needed opportunities to smaller, local companies in many of the world's less prosperous regions.
FTIT February 7 2001
Multilingual websites widen the way to a new online world
By Julian Perkin
Published: February 5 2001 09:53GMT | Last Updated: February 5 2001 16:19GMT
Anyone who surfs the net regularly could easily form the impression that nearly all the world speaks English. The language, it would seem, is fast becoming a lingua franca, with all the benefits this would bring for communication and understanding - and threats to cultural diversity and regional independence.
English is everywhere - in Hollywood films, on TV and in pop music. The vast majority of international conferences and communications for business, science, academia and other disciplines are in English. English is typically the language of people who either come from richer nations, or is the second language used by a wealthy and influential professional elite. Hence its dominance.
As a consequence, English documents pervade the internet. Statistics vary, but the estimates suggest that around three quarters of the pages on the worldwide web are in English. Yet only 5.4 per cent - little more than 1 in 20 - of the world's population have English as their mother tongue, according to IDC, the Boston-based IT market researchers. The majority of these are Americans. A further 7 per cent of the world's population are proficient English speakers, so the language is a good means of communication for around an eighth of the world's inhabitants.
There are fractionally more native Spanish speakers in the world, and the Chinese languages dwarf English as a native language, spoken by 20.7 per cent of the world population. Three-quarters of these, or 15 per cent of the world population, speak Mandarin alone - nearly three times as many people as have English as a first language.
The pre-eminence of English in other fields may be unassailable, but on the internet at least, its dominance is set to decline sharply as international internet access grows and more companies and institutions around the world put their information online and start to conduct e-business.
According to research by Steve McClure at IDC, growth in web usage and e-commerce in Europe and especially in Asia will outstrip that of the US by between two and five times over the next two to three years.
IDC surveys and data from Forrester, another IT market research group, also show, not surprisingly, that the vast majority of people prefer websites in their native language, especially for leisure activities such as online shopping. Moreover, they are more likely to buy things online if they can use their own language.
GlobalSight, a consultancy firm that advises organisations on internationalising websites, estimates that, by 2003, only one third of the projected 603m internet users will be English-speaking.
LeAnn Barber of Scient, an e-commerce consultancy, says: "There is an accelerating boot-strap effect, that is, as more content becomes available in a particular language, more people use the internet, and as more people use the internet, content producers are incentivised to use the internet as a medium."
Websites needed in many languages
Government and venture capitalist investment in infrastructure, she adds, will be required to break the cycle in which there is not enough content to attract users, and consequently not enough users to justify the creation of content.
Companies of any size wanting to leverage the internet to reach global markets, therefore, need to offer versions of their websites in each of the languages of their target markets. But Mr McClure says there is little response from those he has questioned in the US and Europe regarding their plans to make their sites multilingual.
Europe, he notes, has natural advantages over the US, since it has local linguistic skills and inherent cultural diversity. But there is little evidence that European businesses are turning this lead to their advantage.
This may be because the problems of maintaining a multilingual website are formidable.
Translation is just the starting point. Automated translation is available for free to individual web surfers, who can use it to get rough translations. But the quality, although improving, often yields laughable results and is no good for companies wishing to post alternative-language versions of their websites. So web pages have to be translated manually, or else automated translations must be reworked and polished by skilled translators.
Computers can play a valuable role in the overall translation process, providing, for example, online bilingual dictionaries, term banks and translation memories that scan databases of similar sentences that have been well-translated previously.
Once a website is translated into a number of languages, the web's interactive nature invites customers to respond with sales queries and support issues in their own language. Each of these needs to be dealt with in that language, requiring a large number of linguistically, as well as technically, skilled staff.
Sony, which operates websites in 14 languages to market and sell its consumer products such as laptops and memory sticks, is applying technology to automate some of this unwieldy problem. "Translating and localising the website is the easy bit," says Paul Johns, marketing director for Europe, Middle East and Asia at Broadbase (formerly Servicesoft), the company employed by Sony to handle as many queries as possible without human intervention. This is known as multilingual auto-response.
Mr Johns reckons that "80 per cent of all inbound queries to a call centre or website can be dealt with through about 20 answers." The problem is that these 80 per cent of questions can be stated in a myriad ways. And in an appropriate style. Emma Naismith, marketing director at Los Angeles-based Bowne Global Solutions, says prices need to be expressed in the local currency, dates must be in the right format, and weights and measures should be familiar.
Colours and images may need to be altered as they can convey different implications or simply work better in some countries than in others. Black is seen as the sombre colour of mourning in many cultures, but white conveys the same in other countries. A thumbs-up or the showing of palms through a wave can have the opposite of the desired effect.
Some images - especially those symbolic of national pride or patriotism - need to be switched. Graphics may support slogans or captions that contain plays on words that make no sense after translation. Ms Naismith gives this example: "A German ad for a bank shows mice sitting on some coins. The text below the picture reads 'Hier konnen Sie Ihre Mause anlegen', which translates into English as 'Here you can bring your mice'...I n German, 'Mause' ('mice') is a slang word for money...this graphic [as well as the text] would have to be changed for different readerships."
Culture can also influence the design and operations of a website. In Japan, where people are uneasy about giving their credit card details over the web, internet sales processes have to be changed to enable customers to order online, and pick up their goods from a local store or collection point.
In Switzerland and Korea, putting an X in a box -a common technique on web pages for selecting items from a list - suggests that the items should be excluded rather than included. There are also legal and taxation issues that need to be addressed to do business, including e-business, in different countries.
Risk of detering online customers
A good multilingual website will need to be designed well so that, for example, links from Spanish pages always lead to other Spanish pages, these being logical, consistent and faithful translations of the original site.
Some multilingual sites revert to a base language, usually English, when no translated page is available. This risks putting off customers. At the very least, a warning message should be displayed giving them the choice to continue, or quit, or perhaps use a rough automatic translation tool.
From the company's point of view, keeping all the translated pages on the website updated and consistent is a significant challenge. SDL International is one example of a company that is integrating translation memory and work flow tools with standard content management systems from Vignette and Interwoven to provide the necessary multilingual content management.
"Efficiency gains are considerable," says Mark Lancaster, SDL's chief executive. "You wouldn't even attempt these tasks without translation memories and multilingual content management. We are typically seeing 80 per cent gains in speed and 60 per cent gains in cost. And a change to a translated sentence or paragraph on website, including checking in context by a human translator, can be turned around in 10 minutes or half an hour. With manual processes this would have taken between a day and a week."
We cannot expect everything on the web to be available in every language any time soon. The internet started life as a rich archive of references, research and academic papers before it came to be thought of as the platform for e-business.
This enormous virtual library remains in place. Without automated translation of a far superior quality than is currently available, this material is far too voluminous and complex to be translated. At the same time, scientific documents, political and legal papers, newspapers and the like are continually being added in languages other than English at a tremendous rate.
Translations into English may therefore become increasingly important. As ad hoc translations are made, vast translation memories may come to the fore. It should become an important principle that manual translations, and computer-assisted translations that are polished by a human translator, should not be lost so that they can be recognised and offered again.
Colossal challenge
The technical and organisational challenges of managing this process effectively will be a mammoth task. It could be something that is built into a future version of the web. There may in the future be opportunities partially to reimburse the person or organisation that originally made, or footed the bill for, a translation each time it is re-used.
Research from Merrill Lynch suggests that only about 10 per cent of companies that trade across borders on the web have any serious plans for co-ordinating and maintaining their websites across multiple languages.
Perhaps large companies are not best placed to penetrate international markets. Local companies which need operate only in the language of the target market and have a full grasp of cultural issues will have advantages that may give them a strong lead.
It is not difficult to copy the best ideas in e-commerce - such as flight and holiday sales, sales of books and music, auctions and electronic marketplaces - and to establish local language and culturally appropriate versions.
There will be many exceptions where strong companies have products, technology or information that is uniquely available from them - Sony PlayStation games, for example - or where sheer financial muscle enables them to provide more competitive financial products such as insurance.
But the barriers of language and of culture may well put a brake on the ability of corporations to expand unchecked, while also offering much-needed opportunities to smaller, local companies in many of the world's less prosperous regions.
posted by Adriana Francisco at 6:21 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home