Think big

Entrepreneur, May, 2000 by J. W. Dysart, Amanda C. Kooser

Indeed. But while it's tempting to internationalize your Web site the cheapest way possible by simply recruiting an old friend who took a few years of French or Spanish and getting to it, localization services say an apparent "quick fix" is fraught with peril. Paul Fox, vice president of engineering at Excel Translations, a localization service in San Francisco, says Hewlett-Packard (HP) learned this lesson the hard way when it posted nonlocalized instructions for use with its printers on its Asia Web site. As it turns out, HP used the image of a human hand--shown with the palm facing forward--as part of the instructions. Bad move, according to Fox. In Asia, a hand with the palm facing forward is considered an extremely threatening gesture. After consulting with Excel Translation, HP quickly reversed the hand image.

Internet telephone directory 411.com, absorbed by Yahoo! in 1998, also dodged a bullet after consulting with Excel Translations. The reason: 411.com was placing cookies--those digital markers that trace computers' Internet usage--on the PCs of any Web surfers who used its service. Unfortunately, cookies are illegal under French privacy laws. So when 411.com decided to expand into France, it had to eliminate its use of cookies on its French-language site altogether.

Another important quality you should look for in a localization service is an understanding of the idioms and dialects of the markets you're targeting, adds Herve

Rodriguez, Excel Translations' president. Mexico, South America and Spain, for example, all share the same language. But the differences in dialects and idioms are quite stark for Parisian French and the French spoken in Quebec.

Ensure also that the localization service's cultural consultant is well aware of varying cultural reactions to the same color. You'd want to know ahead of time, for example, that the French associate the color purple with death and funeral parlors. Another common color faux pas: using flag colors that are associated with one country when you're trying to appeal to consumers in a rival country. U.S. citizens have difficulty understanding such rivalries. But in Europe, South America and other points on the globe, such nationalism is taken very seriously. "In the European Union alone, there are 16 different countries, 16 different flags," Rodriguez says.

Perhaps a bit more mundane, but no less important, you can save your customers a lot of confusion by making sure that the translation service you pick runs an active terminology-recognition check of all the wording your company puts up on the Internet. That's a fancy way of saying that you should be sure that all the industry-specific phrasings and industry-specific concepts you use are couched in the same wording throughout your Web site for consistency. To put it another way: If you call a part a - "motherboard" on the home page, make sure the same terminology is used throughout your site.

"Overall, I think Web site owners will find countries like Italy, for example, to be an easy localization," Rodriguez says. "But in places like Japan or the Middle East, the localization could be tougher. Such areas have drastically different cultures. And in both cases, Web sites need to be designed for the culture-specific Internet browsers that are used there."