How to justify localization?

For many companies justifying localization costs seems like a Catch-22 dilemma. They know that if they localize their product or website they will get more interest from their international users, but they cannot justify localization and support costs till interest in these markets pick up.

At a recent prospective client meeting, I was asked the usual question: How much increase in revenue should I expect if you localize my product? For all of you who struggle with the same question, here are a few recommended ways to come up with a meaningful answer:

1. Before you even contemplate localizing your product, if it is currently sold and supported in English, consider selling it in other English speaking markets. Almost 40% of the world’s GDP is generated from English-speaking countries. If you are already selling your products in the USA, consider establishing a sales channel in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zeeland, Ireland, or other non-English speaking countries that will be able to use your product in its English form, like The Netherlands, Scandinavia, India, Switzerland… Truth is if you cannot start generating revenues internationally without localization, then localization will most probably not help.
2. Once successful selling in international markets and generating a 20+% increment in revenues over your local market, you may then consider localization to allow international market penetration. With the increased international revenues, you should be able to justify localization costs which are typically a small fraction of your product or web development or optimization costs.
3. With an international sales force and an international client base, or at least their beginnings, you can start polling your sales people, your clients and prospective clients and try to identify the non-English speaking markets that have the most potential for you. It is much less costly to translate surveys than translate and maintain a product then wait for revenues to materialize. With online surveys, the cost and efforts of polling staff or clients are very manageable.
4. If you are the type of executive that likes to solicit input from your lieutenants before making major decisions, refer to the write-up: To localize or not to localize. Much of the information you need to make a decision can be obtained internally from your own staff.
5. If you are looking for a more tangible approach, consider a search-engine based process to help you more accurately identify your most lucrative international markets. It is centered on the use of Pay-Pre-Click campaigns. Refer to the write-up “Going Global on a Shoestring?!” for more information.

If none of the above help you make a decision, or if you do not have the time to investigate, then perhaps you should hold off on localization activities. Yes you can always delegate tasks to an outside localization vendor, but we recommend you only do that after you identify your international opportunity. Selling internationally will still require much of your time and resources. So make sure you free up the necessary time before you plunge in!

No Global ECM without EMCM

I attended the ECM pre-conference training session this week at the AIIM conference in Boston to learn about the latest ECM practices that address today’s global companies’ growing needs.

While presenting her points the instructor was compelled to remain independent of specific tools and vendors. By doing so, unfortunately she gave up not only the reference to and use of commercial tools, but also a myriad of other proprietary solutions, open source technologies and de facto standard tools. Instead, she opted to rely solely on theory in what resulted in a rather dull PowerPoint presentation. Needless to say, the highly anticipated and sold-out full day session fell flat on the ears of its eager audience.

This however was not the only glaring problem of the session. The first goal according to AIIM was to “Learn global best practices for planning and implementing ECM”. So the primary interest for me was to hear about the challenges that multilingual content brings to bear on global ECM solution implementers and users, and to learn about the best practices that AIIM recommends in managing them.

While starting the session by indicating the need to “think globally [and] act locally”, as the training session wore on, the aspect of thinking globally didn’t quite fully materialize. Multilingual content support was never flagged as an issue for attendees to consider!

There are obvious and significant implications that multilingual content will have on ECM practices. For those truly dealing with global ECM, here are a few to think about and plan for, while implementing your solution:

1. If you rely on search-engine based ECM classification, make sure your search engine accepts entries in all needed characters and not just Latin-based. Cyrillic, Asian and Middle-Eastern languages may create a problem. You want to enable all your international users to enter keywords in their native language to search for their in-country developed content and documents.


2. If you rely on taxonomy, controlled vocabulary or complex thesauri for classifying your content, consider localizing them to facilitate classifying multilingual documents. English taxonomy may be ambiguous or irrelevant in other languages.


3. While storing and retrieving multi-lingual documents make sure your storage and viewing tools correctly deal with non-Latin based characters and not transform them into junk characters. If you need to support bi-directional languages, like Arabic or Hebrew, make sure they can handle text written and displayed from right to left.


4. If your web content is localized into multiple languages like most global companies’ websites, decide on how to store your multilingual content and how to associate it and keep it synchronized with its source. Also think about how to deal with source text changing over time and how that will impact your multilingual content. Web pages are dynamic and organic in nature. Keeping all languages in synchronization is a significant undertaking that should not be underestimated.


5. If you are dealing with outside translation vendors who will keep your multilingual text in sync with the source, work out the details of how you will interface with their translation content management system. Also, look into automating the text export and import processes. XML and custom connectors can greatly simplify the hand-off process and streamline these operations.

If you are a global company, don’t limit your thinking and work to the implementation of an Enterprise Content Management System. Instead, think about the implementation of an Enterprise Multilingual Content Management system. Only by supporting and maintaining multilingual content will your ECM solution truly ensure global authenticity, integrity, reliability and usability!

The case for FIGS

In the translation and localization industry, FIGS is an acronym used to reference French, Italian, German and Spanish. Translations from English into FIGS constitute a large percentage of the localization work that takes place in the USA. Unlike Asian, Cyrillic or Middle-Eastern languages, FIGS languages are based on the Roman alphabet. This is why most computing operating systems, software applications and printers that handle English can effectively deal with FIGS requirements with minimal issues.

According to the CIA World Factbook, www.cia.gov, the following are the estimated GDP numbers for 2007. Germany had the fifth largest economy in the world. Along with Austria, whose language is also German, they have a combined GDP of roughly $3.6 Trillion. France, the eighth largest, along with French speaking Belgium and Quebec pulled-in over $2.5 Trillion. Italy comes 10th with roughly $1.8 Trillion. Spain, 11th, Mexico, 12th and Argentina along with other Spanish speaking countries in Central and South America have a $4.5 Trillion GDP combined.

With the advent of Web 2.0 marketing methods, product development costs can be effectively leveraged worldwide. By localizing Pay-Pre-Click campaigns, websites and products into FIGS ($12.5 Trillion market in 2007-Est.), US companies can roughly double the market size that they would otherwise have with US-only sales.

This is why global companies are taking advantage of FIGS localization and translation services to convert products, documents, websites and other essential materials needed to interact with the local user or buyer in FIGS-speaking countries.

With much international exposure and experience, our clients attest to the fact that the language of business is indeed the language of the customer. For information on how you can create a strategy to penetrate FIGS markets, contact me at GlobalVision International for a free consultation.