Willy Brandt, former chancellor of Germany, summed up the globalization imperative nicely when he said, "When I am selling to you, I must speak English. But when you are selling to me, dann müssen Sie Deutsch sprechen [you must speak German]." Whether you're trying to reach employees on a worldwide intranet, business partners on a global extranet or customers on an international storefront, nothing repels visitors faster than a Web site they can't understand.
How important is tailoring your site for a culturally diverse audience? To some extent it depends on who your target market is; but Web users are increasingly likely to speak languages other than English. For instance, research firm Global Reach predicts that by 2004 only one-third of Web users will be native English speakers. Combine this with IDC's estimate that in three years, Internet spending outside the U.S. will top $914 billion -- two-thirds of the world's $1.64 trillion in e-commerce -- and globalization begins to look less like a nice-to-have than a mandate.
Aberdeen Group defines Web Globalization as "the process of developing e-Business applications that seamlessly operate across international boundaries and accommodate multiple languages, cultures, privacy concerns and local business practices." Anyone who has struggled to maintain a Web site in one language will recognize the challenges facing multiple language sites. Content management solutions capable of handling multiple languages and character sets, such as Vignette V/5 and Interwoven TeamSite, can help bring order to the process. But translation and multilingual content management are only part of the story. To communicate effectively across markets, not only a site's language but its cultural and brand connotations must be translated as well.
Consider the difficulty General Motors had rolling out the Chevrolet Nova in Latin American, where in Spanish no va means "doesn't go" -- probably not the impression GM intended to make! Subtler brand dissonances can occur as well. The colors red and green are often used for positive emphasis on U.S. Web sites, for instance; but in China red can have negative connotations, and green can mean bad news in some Buddhist countries and Israel. Cultural signifiers like these are a minefield for the uninitiated.
Doing business across borders also requires adhering to local regulatory and tax issues, including import/export, as well as implementing local business practices and policies. While some of these localization rules can be embedded in an application server and automated, others require a human touch.
The figure below suggests how base-cultural content (say, on a U.S. Web site) is localized for global presentation. The interface with content management and business applications is guided by an overarching globalization strategy.
Don't expect to buy a piece of software that will take care of all your globalization needs. Effective solutions combine technology that streamlines change management and multilingual publishing with human translation and interpretive expertise. Accordingly, many solution providers in this space -- including Berlitz GlobalNET, eTranslate, GlobalSight, Idiom, Lionbridge Technologies, SDL International and Uniscape -- offer both infrastructure software and an extensive network of in-country translators. Often, the software will support the vendor's service offering by automating content flows to translators in a platform-neutral format such as XML. Tools such as translation memories and language knowledge bases can help streamline the translation process itself.
In addition to these operational issues, there remain technical challenges associated with representing certain types of data internationally on the Web. Resolving these issues, which concern times and dates, currencies, sorts and searches, character sets and other regionally variable information, is the goal of the W3C Internationalization (I18N) working group (www.w3c.org/Internationalization) and other industry organizations, such as the Localisation Industry Standard Association (LISA, www.lisa.org).
The Internet is inherently global, but bridging linguistic and cultural divides has always challenged businesses, and e-Business is no exception. Globalizing your Web site will require a sound business strategy, reliable, streamlined processes for maintaining multiple, multilingual sites, and an ongoing investment in tools and services.
Look at it this way: if it was going to be easy, there wouldn't have been a Tower of Babel.
About the Author
Gordon Benett is a Senior Analyst
at Aberdeen Group with a research focus in Enterprise Java and Middleware.
He founded Intranet Design Magazine and has over 16 years experience
consulting to Fortune 500 clients, including Fleet Bank, New England
Electric and General Electric. Gordon welcomes your comments at
g.benett@ieee.org.
Reprinted from Intranet Design Magazine.
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