Are you translation efforts creating measurable dividends?

We had a meeting recently with a frustrated international marketing manager who works for a large manufacturer of high-end electronic equipment. He was the only international marketing employee for this half a billion dollar organization earning revenues mainly from the USA.

He was clearly upset when he indicated that his upper management does not put much value in his translation efforts and that year after year his translation budgets have dwindled. Yet international growth is strategic to their business!

Three attempts had previously been made to budget for the translation of the entire website and marketing collateral without having objective results directly tied to the translation work. Every time the budget was denied.

When asked if the number of leads generated from the already localized web landing pages were measured and tracked, he stated that leads are the responsibility of another group and that he had no visibility into the effect of translation on lead or revenue.

This is not uncommon. In most large companies each employee has a role and is often compensated or reviewed against his or her core objectives. Employees are not usually motivated to step outside their responsibilities’ boundaries to achieve better results for the company. This unfortunately decrements the chances of success for everyone!

Now, what if this individual worked with the person in charge of leads to understand how he is helping contribute against the international leads goals? What if at the same time he reached out to the International VP of Sales to see how the international leads are contributing to international sales? What if the three made a case to translate key marketing collateral, campaigns, and web pages, to show management how speaking the customers’ language can increase leads and international revenues?

You think this is too hard to do? Not really! Click on the GlobalVision free white papers link and download the white paper “Going global on a shoestring”.

Everyone knows that the language of business is the language of the customer. But when it comes to investing money to communicate in the customer’s language, the need for ROIs (return on investment analysis) often gets in the way.

Prove the value of your translation and localization efforts to get the needed budgets, then translate and localize your collateral and products professionally to help drive international business. When you do it right, your company’s international growth will materialize and you will no longer be the lowly frustrated international marketing manager ; instead, you will become the (unsung) hero!

Innovation, Service and Price

Every now and then I take calls from prospective clients indicating that times have changed and that localization vendors can no longer command the rates of a few years back.

They quote industry pundits who argue the benefits of machine translation and crowdsourcing. They relate cases of firms charging single digit cents per word for translation. They demand steep concessions in price and quick wins.

While many in the translation and localization industry are building translation environments that leverage machine translation, crowdsourcing, or large public-domain translation memories, no such solution has yet proven effective across the board.

Before GlobalVision opened its doors for business 13 years ago, having come from engineering backgrounds, we took a serious look at the state of technology in the translation and localization industry. We quickly realized that it was a no brainer to invest in translation memory tools and we promptly built our entire process around them. Payback from these tools was recouped within months.

Today, no other technology has produced the same efficiency effect on the localization process. Yes translation management systems are streamlining the process, facilitating collaboration and optimizing project management, but so far, they have been very costly and have not created the efficiency gains experienced by translation memory tools. Translation continues to be the critical path of any localization project and unless translators’ efficiency is improved, no serious efficiencies are gained throughout the overall process.

Statistical machine translation and translation collaboration tools have over the next decade the potential to produce these efficiency gains, but not today, not with the current state of these tools, not across all industry verticals.

Treacy and Wiersema in their book The Discipline of Market Leaders talked about three values:

1. Value proposition, leading to operational excellence, leading to cost reduction and lower price
2. Value-driven operating model leading to product leadership, innovation and quality
3. Value disciplines leading to customer intimacy and excellence in service

They argued that no business can succeed by trying to be all three to all customers.

In these hard economic times, many companies will continue to reduce budgets and seek trimming expenses. While considering renewing or altering your partnership with your translation and localization service provider, heed the advice of Treacy and Wiersema. Don’t hire the lowest cost vendor and expect excellence in customer service or product leadership. Similarly, don’t call on a company with excellence in service and expect them to offer the lowest rates.