Monthly Email Newsletter
June 2004
IN THIS ISSUE:
I. Message from the Editor
II. Articles:
*** FEATURE ARTICLE: Globalization - Part 1
1. Expert Interview: How to Globalize Your
Web Site Like the World's Top Companies
*** FEATURED LANGUAGE: Japanese
2. Japan's E-Commerce Market Keeps Growing
3. Origin and Development of the Japanese
Language
III.
*** Helpful Web Tools
4. Online Web Site Globalization Resources
IV. In Our Next Issue
V. Your Feedback
VI. How to Subscribe
I. MESSAGE FROM THE EDITOR
Ever since we started writing the
Global Communicator many of you have
asked us to provide expert guidance that your company can implement to expand
its business internationally. In response to your requests, our first
article focuses on web site globalization. It is based on an interview
conducted by our head writer Myriam Telles with Renato Beninatto, a renowned
expert in global business and an authority in the localization industry.
Renato's firm recently developed an extensive study of web site globalization
strategies that have been used by the world's highest-revenue companies.
Since this month's newsletter also focuses on the Japanese language, the
interview also provides you with Mr. Beninatto's valuable advice for creating
web sites that attract customers from Japan.
In our
Featured Language section, our second article gives you a quick
update of Japan's growing e-commerce market, while our third article focuses on
the complex history and development of the Japanese language.
Our
Helpful Web Tools section describes web site globalization resources
that allows you to access information about the tools companies use to
internationalize their software and web applications and to maintain
multilingual web sites efficiently.
Since this newsletter is meant to create a virtual community where we share the
latest news and advice, we invite you to submit your suggestions, story ideas,
statistics and web site tips to
mailto:newsletter@globallanguages.com.
-- Inna Kassatkina, Editor
mailto:editor@globallanguages.com
II. ARTICLES
**** FEATURED ARTICLE: Web Site Globalization, Part 1
EXPERT INTERVIEW: HOW TO GLOBALIZE YOUR WEB SITE LIKE THE WORLD'S TOP COMPANIES
Globalization of your company's products and services may be one of the most
important strategic decisions you will face. After all, the wealth and
long-term prosperity of your company may be at stake. But just what is
globalization anyway?
On a lofty, macroscopic level, globalization can be envisioned as a process
that results in the interaction and integration of people, companies, markets,
and economies via international business and trade. In recent years the
advent of globalization has increased due to new international trade
agreements, investments across borders, and the opening of markets encouraged
by the World Wide Web.
On a national level, globalization's effects can be very far reaching too. A
nation's environment, culture, political system, economic development and
prosperity are oftentimes affected. All you need to do is witness the
explosive economic growth and poverty reduction in China, India, and other
countries that were poor 20 years ago, but are now growing in prosperity
primarily as the result of their globalization strategies.
http://www.globalization101.org/globalization/
http://www1.worldbank.org/economicpolicy/globalization/
So how do you begin developing a winning globalization strategy for your
company? Many of the world's top companies have found that globalizing
their web sites has been an effective and profitable component of expanding
their business internationally. If your company is contemplating the creation
of a global web site, where do you begin to obtain the insight and guidance to
design a successful global web site? You can begin by learning from the
experts: the companies with top revenues in countries around the world who have
successful multilingual web sites.
This was the approach that Renato Beninatto and Donald DePalma, the principals
and lead researchers of Common Sense Advisory, took when they conducted
research to study the design practices and strategies used by 400 companies in
16 countries around the world to develop and run their multilingual web
sites. Only the top 25 revenue producing companies in each country were
included in the study. The study also cut across business sectors, including:
aerospace and defense, pharmaceuticals, retail, agriculture, automotive and
transport, banking, healthcare, business services and equipment, financial
services, food, industrial manufacturing, consumer products manufacturing,
insurance, leisure, media, metals and mining, real estate, security products
and services, telecommunications equipment and services, and transportation
services. The results of Beninatto's and DePalma's study was recently
presented in their report
Design Practices for Global Gateways.
The following article presents an interview that our head writer, Myriam
Telles, conducted with one of the authors of the study, Renato Beninatto, who
is a renowned expert in global business and a localization industry authority
with broad experience as a writer, speaker, entrepreneur, practitioner and
strategist. In this interview Mr. Beninatto provides you with valuable
guidance based on his firm's extensive study that can assist your company to
develop its own winning web site globalization strategy.
Question: How do we decide what languages to provide on our web
site?
Answer: Our research showed that 98.5 percent of the 400 company
web sites in 16 countries around the world that we reviewed offered web sites
in English, while 21.7 percent supported Spanish, 17.2 percent supported
French, 16.1 percent offered Chinese, and 10.9 percent supported German on
their web sites. About 7.5 percent of the companies also offered web sites in
Italian, Japanese, or Korean. Most companies offered a web site in their
domestic language as well as at least one more web site in a foreign language.
The question of which languages or countries your web site should support
begins with your corporate goals, your company's assessment of the foreign
market's potential, competitive risk, and other business and in-country
political and economic factors. You should also base your language
selection on your company's prior successes with ethnic markets within your
country. For example, if you find that your products or services are
popular among Hispanic customers in the USA, then test market the effectiveness
of a Spanish language web site in the USA first before deciding to establish
similar web sites in other countries.
Also, do your research in the foreign country to study the most popular web
sites' designs and features so that you're familiar with what your
international customers will expect. You may find that you will have to
offer them different payment and delivery methods that are not usually provided
in your own country.
Basically, when it comes to multilingual web sites, which can be expensive to
run and maintain, its better to use and maintain them where it makes business
sense and walk before your run when it comes to design.
Question: Should we tailor our web sites to a given language or to
a particular country?
Answer: Global strategists often ask this question. Our answer has
always been that "it depends -- on whether you're marketing yourself as a
company or you are selling a product."
Our research revealed that more than half of the companies we surveyed opted to
target a language over a particular nation or locale, because their web sites
were primarily established for corporate positioning purposes. On the
other hand, if your web site will be selling its products online,
nation-specific or locale-specific issues such as dialectal nuances, currency,
logistics, taxes, etc. favor the use of a country-specific or regional approach
to creating your web site.
In addition to registering your web sites, your company's legal department
should also assure that the company's trademarks, product brand names, and
patents are protected abroad. It's also important to check that your
company's name or the names of its products don't mean something derogatory or
negative in the foreign country's language.
Question: What design practices should we employ as we create our
multilingual web site?
Answer: Our research showed that the companies with the highest
revenues in the countries we surveyed, employed the following common practices:
1. Use professional help in designing and
crafting your global web sites.
2. Use content management system (CMS)
technology to assist them in obtaining content consistency and improving
workflow among international web sites.
3. Follow some basic design principles, such as:
-- Use navigation
bars to direct visitors to multilingual web sites
-- Place the
pointer or icon to the international web sites in the upper right corner of the
Global Gateway page. The Global Gateway is the international entry point
to a company on the web that alerts visitors to country-specific or translated
content.
-- Use widely
recognized icons, such as a globe
-- Use a pull-down
menu that allows visitors to select a specific language
-- Use skilled
translators who are also excellent writers; rewriting is often required to make
content comprehensible and respectful in other languages
-- Follow
widely-established design parameters and page layouts with which visitors are
generally familiar
Question: What do you mean when you say we should seek
"professional help"?
Answer: The design of successful domestic web sites requires the
involvement of web development, online marketing, customer service, and offline
teams responsible for advertising and promotion, manufacturing, and other
operations. Creating and running multilingual web sites complicates
matters further by adding issues like translation plus interactions with other
constituencies inside headquarters, in regions, and in country units.
We have found that a successful multilingual web site design team usually
consists of an employee who "owns" the website, an external lead agency that
serves as the general contractor, and depending on the complexity of the
overall project, a variety of outside agencies that it manages. The lead
agency should work closely with the internal owner and your web, marketing, and
related customer teams.
Question: Why would we need to involve more than one agency?
Answer: Because there aren't many, if any, firms that can do
justice to full-bore marketing online and offline, multilingual web
development, back end integration, business consulting and strategizing, and
the translation activities performed by language service providers.
Of course, the complexity of the team depends on the complexity of the
project. Much less effort is required to create simple sites that give
potential customers brief information about your company and its products and
services and refers then to a company contact for further information, versus
creating multilingual web sites that also allow them to buy your products
online. And historically certain languages, such as Japanese, are
especially challenging to work with and have customers that are very particular
about what they expect you to provide online.
Question: What domain extension should we attach to our foreign
web site's name?
Answer: Our study showed that most companies around the world
selected a .com suffix. However, about 44.7 percent of the companies also
favored using a national suffix combined with a .com, for example
"autopia.com.br" in Brazil. Many companies choose to register both types
of suffixes. Before you decide what suffixes to select, review the most popular
web sites in the country you are planning to target.
Question: What should we do to protect our brand name?
Answer:
Here are a few things to do to protect your brand
name:
1) To protect your company's brand name, consider
registering your web site address using various suffixes (.com, .org., .net,
.biz, etc.) in the countries you are targeting. Although it is more
costly, you can save time registering your multilingual websites by working
with an international registration broker like Register.com or
1GlobalPlace. The latter registry tells you upfront what restrictions --
such as the need to have a global address -- that a country places on
registration and can help you register domains even in the more restrictive
countries that require a local presence.
2) Trademark your brand names at home and in target
countries
Question: Do you have any advice for creating web sites that
attract customers from Japan?
Answer: Yes. Here are some factors to remember, based on our own
experience:
1) Realize that it may take special effort to truly
understand what Japanese customers expect from your web site, products, or
services. It's very important to listen patiently and work with a
translator who is thoroughly familiar with both, your domestic language and the
Japanese language and local customs and norms in Japan.
2) Expect Japanese to deal with problems after they
occur. If you are working with Japanese consultants, for example, they
may opt to wait until the last minute to alert you of a problem, rather than
alert you that they need help early in the process.
3) Japanese people expect a higher level of service
and accuracy than most other customers. So if your web site doesn't sound
and look Japanese, they will trash it. Their discontent with your web
site may also have nothing to do with the quality of your translation, but with
the fact that you don't offer specific features in your product or service that
they are used to receiving, such as the duration of your warranty, the interval
between scheduled maintenance for an engine, or the temperature range
specifications. Your customer service people must be fully fluent in
Japanese, should respond quickly, and must be thorough in eliciting customers'
feedback.
4) When working with local Japanese translators,
realize that gender roles may play a part in the work process. If you get
help with content development in Japanese, remember that in many translation
agencies Japanese women translate whereas Japanese men review and critique the
results. And women do not criticize men.
5) Language is part of the culture. Localizing
your web site into Japanese requires crossing the barrier between the Western
culture and the Asian culture. So it's wise to work with a reviewer or
focus group in Japan to evaluate the "understandability" of your Japanese
content as well of as the navigability and user-friendliness of your web site,
prior to launching the web site to the public.
Also keep in mind that what Japanese reviewers say about your web site may not
be what you think they are saying. For example, if they think the quality
of your web site if off only by a small margin, they will say "you are almost
correct." But if they think your Japanese web site's quality is way off they
will likely say "this is a little bit different" in order to avoid insulting
you.
ABOUT THE EXPERT: Renato Beninatto is one of the principals of
Common Sense Advisory, a research and consulting firm founded by Donald
DePalma, that provides original localization research to help companies
maximize their global potential while minimizing the cost, complexity, and
effort of their multilingual communications. He is also a widely
recognized expert and analyst in the fields of global business, technology, and
services. Mr. Beninatto can be contacted at
mailto:renato@commonsenseadvisory.com.
****FEATURED LANGUAGE: JAPANESE
2. JAPAN'S E-COMMERCE MARKET KEEPS GROWING
According to recent AsiaBiz reports, Japan's online population has grown to
69.4 million, which is equivalent to 54 percent of the country's population,
making Japan the world's second largest Internet economy. Only the United
States has a greater online market.
Currently over 80 percent of Japanese households are online, compared to 79.1
percent of Japanese-based businesses.
The number of people using high-speed Internet connections has also grown to 21
million, representing about 30 percent of its online population.
Wireless access dominates Japan's Internet market, with 49.5 million people
accessing the Internet via Web-enabled phones.
3. ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE JAPANESE LANGUAGE
The origin of the Japanese language is the subject of hot debate among
scholars. Unfortunately, there is no agreed upon definitive study to prove
where the Japanese language originated. Additionally, scholars cannot
agree on which language is the most closely related to Japanese. The origin of
the Japanese language is truly an enigma. However, we shall try to shed a
bit of light on this controversy.
(
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/ANCJAPAN/LANGUAGE.HTM)
In the past century, scholars proffered evidence for linking the origin of the
Japanese language to many other languages including: Chinese, Korean,
Polynesian, Mongolian, Manchu, and Turkish. Of these, many scholars
hypothesize that Japanese has it closest origins in the Ural-Altaic family that
includes Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, and Korean.
(
http://www.alsintl.com/languages/japanese.htm)
Among the Ural-Altaic languages, Korean is often cited as having several
features in common with the Japanese language. These include: structure, vowel
harmony, lack of conjunctions, and honorific or respectful speech. However,
many inconsistencies have been cited, including that the pronunciation in
Korean and Japanese is significantly different.
Japanese also shares many similarities with the languages of the Ryukyu Islands
that include the Okinawa Island group. This has led to another popular
hypothesis, namely, that Japanese finds its origins in the Austronesian
languages of the South Pacific.
And yet another hypothesis of Japanese historical linguists suggests a hybrid
relationship where Japanese was influenced by both Austronesian and Altic
languages.
Some insight about the origin and development of the Japanese language comes
from historical events. Some of the earliest references to what is now Japan
were recorded by the Chinese as early as several hundred years BC, The Chinese
described the unification of the area around what is now Japan as a nation of
tribal communities. And references to a proto-Japanese people date back to the
3
rd century AD, when various clan tribes consolidated to become the
Yamato Clan. This is probably the commonly accepted period signifying the
formation of Japan.
(
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/WestTech/japanval.htm)
There is general agreement that the Chinese had a major influence on the
Japanese language during the late 5
th or 6
th centuries
AD. The Han Dynasty is credited with introducing Chinese governmental systems,
art styles, manufacturing methods, Buddhism, and the Chinese characters
(Kanji), which is believed to have provided the Japanese with the ability to
write for the first time. This early language is generally referred to as "Old
Japanese."
Historically, a confounding factor blurring our basic understanding of the
origin and development of the Japanese language has been the many migrations
and influences of foreign peoples. As an example, archeological and
anthropological studies suggest that there were at least three groups of
distinct people who occupied the Japanese islands prior to the introduction of
Wet Rice methods sometime around the 5
th century AD. It has been
hypothesized that a wave of Koreans immigrated to Japan and introduced Wet-Rice
methods, while introducing cultural changes and the Korean language in a manner
similar to the Chinese influences of the 3
rd century AD. Comparison
of ancient Korean and ancient Japanese shows over 20 phonetically-corresponding
rules, many similarities between vocabulary words used to name body parts, and
similar syntax structures. And there are many other similar examples of Western
and Asian influences on the Japanese language and nation.
(
http://users.tmok.com/~tumble/jpp/japor.html)
The three written forms of Japanese consist of Kanji and two phonetic scripts
(also called syllabaries or Kana). The Chinese introduced Kanji in the 3
rd
century. Then, in the 7
th century Buddhists priests developed a
phonetic system that formed the basis of modern-day Katakana. Finally, in the 8
th
century women of the Heian court in Kyoto developed a second phonetic script,
now called Hiragana.
(
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761568918/Japanese_Language.html)
The transition from "Old Japanese" (based on eight vowels) to "Modern Japanese"
(now based on five vowels) took place between the 12
th and 16
th
centuries AD.
Modern Japanese now consists of three different character sets (excluding the
use of Roman letters too): Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji.
The Kana scripts are called syllabaries because they represent unique sounds of
syllables in the Japanese language. Each of these scripts has about fifty
sounds.
(
http://www.threeweb.ad.jp/logos/japanese.html)
Hiragana is the basic set of symbols used to write words, taught to every
Japanese student, and commonly found in newspapers. Katakana is used primarily
for poetry and words of foreign origin ("loan words"), borrowed from
Portuguese, English, German, French, and many other languages.
(
http://www.seanspot.com/jwrite/jwrite-mframe.htm)
In 1981, the Jōyō Kanji (Chinese characters for daily use) were
standardized by the Japanese government. Currently, there are 1,945 recognized
Chinese characters. These are taught in primary and secondary schools, and
newspapers generally limit the use of Chinese characters to this standard set.
Today, the influence of the Chinese language on Japanese remains apparent with
approximately 40% of the vocabulary of modern Japanese consisting of words
adapted from Chinese.
In terms of the spoken word in Japan today, there are three major dialects: the
Kansai Dialect of Osaka/Kyoto/Kobe, the Kyushu Dialect of Japan's southern-most
island, and the Tokyo Dialect of the Kanto Region. Of these, the Tokyo Dialect
is considered the standard dialect.
It should be noted that certain peoples residing in the Hokkaido islands and
northernmost parts of Honshuu speak Ainu. The Ainu language in generally
considered to be a unique language. It is not simply a dialect of Japanese.
(
http://www.threeweb.ad.jp/logos/japanese.html#ainu)
As you can see, the origin of the Japanese language is truly an enigma. But it
remains a hotly debated topic because it ranks as one of the world's most
important languages with over 124 million speakers. The vast majority of these
speakers reside in Japan and the Okinawa islands. But millions of other
near-native speakers live in Korea, China, or other parts of Asia. And another
few million live in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and other nations.
III.
**** HELPFUL WEB TOOLS
4. ONLINE WEB SITE GLOBALIZATION RESOURCES
If your company has decided to launch its globalization efforts by
creating multilingual web sites, you'll need to learn about the best
tools that experts use to internationalize their software and web applications
and to maintain their web sites efficiently. The Globalization Resources
link shown below provides a comprehensive list and links to tools used during
each stage of the globalization process, such as: html and xml editors,
computer aided translation (CAT) tools, translation memory suites, desktop
publishing tools, graphics editors, internationalization tools used by software
engineers, tools to localize user interfaces, content management solutions
(CMS) software, and more.
(
http://www.globalization.com/PortalInfoTree/MainPage.cfm?page_id=1301
)
IV. IN OUR NEXT ISSUE
*** FEATURED INDUSTRY: Globalization - Part II
*** FEATURED LANGUAGE: Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, and other Indian languages
V. YOUR FEEDBACK
Have questions? Or a story idea or topic you would like us to address
in a future issue? Let us know by sending a message to
newsletter@globallanguages.com.
VI. HOW TO SUBSCRIBE
