Online translation systems
Article Date: Mar 27 2008
The internet may have started life as an exclusively English-language medium, but in the past decade that has changed dramatically. Analysts estimate that 70 per cent of e-commerce is now conducted in languages other than English.
For online retailers pushing beyond the UK that presents a major barrier to growth. In a bid to achieve a multi-lingual web presence, organisations face the prospect of translating hundreds of product descriptions and related web pages. Not only is that a highly costly undertaking but the dynamic nature of e-commerce means that by the time the painstaking, manual translation is complete, the original content has often been updated.
The answer to the cost-effective, dynamic globalisation of web content is a bundle
of technology and services – content management workflow, knowledge management, machine translation and the minimum intervention of human translation.
Big names that have honed offerings in this area include SDL, Lionbridge Technologies and Merrill Brink. But while their approaches differ slightly, their aim is the same: to take the sting out of the cost and delivery times associated with web globalisation.
Return on investment
The service has had a clear payback at UK electronics parts distributor, RS Components. With its expansion into Italy, France and Germany, it faced the burden of its local teams managing the translation of 60,000 product descriptions using traditional methods – a million words of translation.
By using an automated system, the company reported a 25 per cent improvement in productivity – helping it meet tight deadlines for the roll-out of new products while reducing the cost of the localisation of content by 27 per cent.
According to IT industry analyst group Forrester, global businesses are losing market share worth as much as $1.6 billion per year by failing to localise product information. Its recent study of the application of web globalisation at six mid-sized and large enterprises found that properly localised information is a source of competitive advantage when launching products or services across global markets.
A typical enterprise could realise internal and external localisation savings
of $4.6 million and boost overall market share by 1.5 per cent over three years by deploying an effective information localisation strategy, says Forrester.
As Rob Fifield, head of media production at RS Components, confirms: ‘[The approach] translates into faster time-to-revenue at a lower cost.’
