By MARK GIBBS
Network World, 02/22/99
 Your company is headquartered in the states and you want to become an international player. Launching an e-comm site provides the reach, but that doesn't mean a global audience will come flocking. Mais oui?
Parlez-vous français? No? OK, how about "Sprechen sie deutsch?" "Parlate italiano?" or "Você fala o português?" Hmm.
If you're planning on doing e-commerce on an international basis, you'll face a lot of tough issues, including how to deal with payments and distribute products. But one of the most important issues is language.
Thinking that most people who use the Internet speak and read English is naive. Euro-Marketing Associates, an Internet marketing consulting firm, estimates that approximately 45 million people in America don't speak English when they go home at night, and of those people, an estimated 11 million are Internet users. In a study published in December 1998, the San Francisco firm reported that some 42% of the total Internet user population is non-English speaking.
You cannot underestimate the value of localization. Using computerized translation software, you could localize the company's e-commerce site for just about any language you, or rather your audience, pleases.
But be warned, the results are often not quite what you might hope. After it's run through translation software, the German book titled Shrouded in Mystery comes out Secret Stench, points out Robert Sprung, chairman and founder of Harvard Translations, a language-translation company in Cambridge, Mass.
You can see the problem easily if you try Altavista's machine translation service, found at http://jump.altavista.com/translate. If you translate text into another language and back again, the result will be gibberish, Sprung says.
Nonetheless, Sprung adds, even if the results of machine translation are rough, they may still be useful. "This is called 'gisting,' and for many purposes, gisting will do the job."
Serious translations call for human involvement, and that doesn't come cheap. Retail rates for translating marketing copy so it is suitable for an e-commerce site could cost from 30 cents to 60 cents per word, per language, Sprung estimates. The cost is calculated by the number of words output and not by the original word count - not surprisingly, the word count tends to expand.
Deciding which content to translate should be a serious undertaking, Sprung says. "Remember, you can't scale back later without annoying someone."
Rather than hiring a translation service to localize your site, a more effective strategy may be to find a business partner in each major international market with which you deal. Sonnet Financial, an international funds brokerage, in San Mateo, Calif., is doing just that, says Ann Brighouse, director of product marketing for the firm.
Sonnet has engaged SoftBank, in a venture called ForexBank, to set up the same online operation in Japan as it has in the U.S., but translated into Japanese with local sales support, Brighouse says. Content originates from Sonnet's U.S. operation and is replicated to the Japanese server. Sonnet and SoftBank are in constant contact to ensure that fresh content is translated in a timely fashion.
"Partnering sure helps build market share - with SoftBank, we get the value of its name and brand, and a local sales presence. When you talk about dealing with customers in Japan, that would be an enormous learning curve for us if we didn't have a partner on the ground," Brighouse says. She adds that Sonnet is exploring other partnering opportunities, particularly in English-speaking countries where banking practices are different from those in the U.S.
Even if you've got the language down, keeping a good image can be tough. Consider the disparities in Internet service, for example.
A New York company shipping sales database updates via the Internet to a business partner in Chicago has little about which to worry. But if the company is thinking about doing large or frequent transactions with a customer in Lahore, Pakistan, or a reseller in Moscow, it's got to deal with the ramifications of low volume, infrequent, slow and often disrupted Internet service. Mirroring a server in the target country might provide relief, but making arrangements with ISPs in other countries can be difficult and time-consuming.
Bandwidth limitations also mean a company has to take care with Web content. When prospects and customers are in countries with low bandwidth and poor-quality connections, they'll find it difficult to download Web content that originates in the U.S.
While being on the Internet means you have global reach, you'll have to work hard to gain a global capability. If you get it right, you'll have the satisfaction of having the Italians say "Un piacere vi che fa commercio con," the French "Un plaisir faisant des affaires avec vous," and the Germans "Ein Vergnügen, das Geschäft mit Ihnen tut." Hearing "A pleasure doing business with you" sounds great in any language.
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Gibbs is a consultant and writer based in Ventura, Calif. He can be reached at (800) 622-1108, Ext. 7504, or mgibbs@ gibbs.com.
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