Industry Briefs
Financial Benefits and Cost of Localizing Websites
Looking ahead to 2011, many of our clients are localizing, or expanding their websites in multiple languages to ensure that they don’t lose out on this avenue of profitability for the coming year. Here are some interesting statistics to demonstrate the financial benefits of investing in website localization from LISA.
According to the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA), an examination of the revenues of just those 2006 Global Fortune 500 companies that LISA knows to be actively localizing their products or services yields annual total revenues of approximately $5.9 trillion (with profits of $365 billion). If only 10% of their total revenues are derived from international sales dependent upon localization (i.e., sales that would not have been made were products or services not localized), this means that $590 billion of their revenues would not have been achieved without localization.
With some LISA members’ international revenues hovering around 70%, it is clear that localization is a key component of their business strategies. Without localization, they could not maintain positions of world leadership. Based on interviews with LISA members and other companies, globalization experts, and companies just beginning to engage in international business, LISA believes that industry size is only half of the picture, and that any complete view of the globalization industry needs to examine the revenues unlocked through globalization. In 2001, LISA members reported that, on average, they achieved $10 of additional revenue for every $1 spent on localization. Since that time, LISA members have almost universally reported 15–25% annual productivity increases on their localization spending. This means that today companies are receiving approximately $25 of additional revenue for every $1 spent on localization, placing the annual spending of the International Fortune 500 on globalization-related services at a minimum of approximately 24 billion.
What about the Cost?
With profitability assured, there is still the question of availability of funds for localization. Since the average cost for site localization can run anywhere from $10,000.00 to $125,000, here are some questions that must be answered and provided to the localizer to arrive at the cost for localization:
- How many countries are you doing or planning to do business with?
- What is the size of your website? (in words or pages)
- Availability of source files/HTML
- Number and complexity of Graphics, Flash files
- Videos (voiceover or subtitles), other links to be localized?
- Site testers – determine number of review cycles
- Development of glossary and translation memory for future updates
For additional information, see our section on Website Localizatiion
MicroSites – a Good Alternative
With today’s economic downturn, many small businesses cannot afford to spend the funds for a complete localization of their website. Agnew offers a good alternative –MicroSites. By carefully selecting the most important information from your English site, you can still capture significant amount of new business from non-English speaking markets. Translating the pages: Home; Who we are? Our products? Contact Us, pages with links to catalogs and other areas of the site that remain in Englsh, you can still reach a significant number of non-English speaking viewers and gain profitability.
The population of foreign language speakers in the US is growing. With at least 55 million people in the country speaking languages besides English in their homes, the need for effective non-English
communication grows every day. Latinos alone make up at least 36% of California’s population, and approximately 15% of the US as a whole. That’s before taking into account customers in foreign markets that your company is trying to reach.
The conclusion is simple: marketing in multiple languages increases your profitability, and with current goals to increase American exports, displaying your products and services in multiple languages is certain to attract customers. MicroSites are a cost-effective marketing tool that can serve as an alternative to localizing your entire site.
Agnew Multilingual’s unique foreign language MicroSites will allow you to post three to four pages of key information in four languages of your choice for less than two thousand dollars. This information will be accurately translated by native speakers for your target audience, allowing customers to receive it in the language of their preference. For examples of MicroSites, click the flags at the top of our website: www.agnew.com. Please contact us for additional information.
Source: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s0053.pdf - data from 2007; the 55 million estimate was arrived at by subtracting the number of individuals who speak only English from the total number of speakers over age 5 and rounding to the nearest million.
Source: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html - percentages from 2008.
En Breve
En Breve, your intelligence brief on the U.S. Hispanic market and media is published by ImpreMedia, the No. 1 Hispanic News and Information Company in the U.S. Useful resource for companies doing business with the Hispanic market or advertising their services or products to the Hispnic population.
http://www.impremedia.com/enbreve/04-09.html
The Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA)
LISA was founded in 1991 to enable companies and individuals to share experiences and build a community of those involved with the processes needed to adapt products for local markets. By working together, LISA members successfully created a new industry—the localization industry—and have raised the profile of their activities to the point that increasing numbers of corporations are treating product globalization as an area of utmost strategic importance.
http://www.lisa.org
Ethnic Technologies
Ethnic Technologies, provides list brokers and corporations the world's most sophisticated list and data enhancement services for ethnic, religious, and language preference market targeting. Ethnic Technologies licenses the E-Tech market targeting system software and provides access to lists (of all kinds, everyone has an ethnic heritage) that have been E-Teched®. Please read the following excellent article:
Multicultural Name Identification
by Candace Kennedy
Conventional wisdom says that America is a melting pot of many different cultures. Try mixing up six different cheeses in a pot then try to find the different taste values of each. It is very difficult to do. The same idea applies to identifying the different cultures that make up our nation. The segmentation system that we habitually use simply divides the population into color or racial categories: White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian. Using this type of approach or methodology has its downfalls and in most cases antiquated census information is used, as it's sole input for development. A better approach is to see the diversity in America as a mixed salad, where each ethnicity is a different ingredient and can be identified. This method, if used properly applies to the many ethnicities and different cultures in our nation and each can be identified.
More...http://www.ethnictechnologies.com/blog/2009/07/07/multicultural-name-identification.html
Machine Translation - Special Briefing
LISA - BEST PRACTICE GUIDE: Implementing Machine Translation |
