Language Problems – Ecommerce Website Solutions
It is suggested that the only way to do business successfully in other cultures is to adapt to those cultures. The phrase “think globally and act locally” perfectly describes this approach. The primary step an online business often takes to reach potential customers in other countries is to provide local language versions of their website. This means that you will need to translate the e-commerce website into another dialect or regional language. According to research, customers are much more likely to buy products and services from websites in their own languages. Only about 400 million of the world’s 6 billion people learned English as their mother tongue.
The researchers also analyze that only fifty percent of the content available on the Internet is in English and more than half of today’s Internet users do not read English. International Data Corporation predicts that by 2010, more than 80 percent of Internet users will be outside the United States and 65 percent of electronic commerce transactions will involve at least one party located outside the United States.
Even many languages require separate dialects and multiple translations. For example, the Spanish languages spoken in Mexico, Spain, and Latin America have different dialects. Therefore, it is important to check and translate the differences between the spelling and the meaning of the words. In general, many companies translate the pages of their websites. As the web company grows, it becomes more selective in its translation efforts. Some eCommerce websites have thousands of web pages with a lot of specific content; the web companies that operate those sites may find that the cost of translating all the pages is high.
The decision to translate a specific web page should be made by the corporate department responsible for the content of each page. Remember that the home page of an eCommerce website should have versions in all supported dialects and languages. E-commerce website pages designed for product information, marketing, and branding should be given a high priority for translation.
Different approaches may be appropriate for translating the different types of text that appear on an e-commerce site. For key advertising messages, the touch of a human translator can be crucial in capturing subtle meanings. For more routine transaction processing tasks, machine translation software can be a satisfactory alternative. Many of the companies in this field are working to improve software and databases of previously translated material that can help human translators work more accurately and efficiently. Translation services and software vendors that work with e-commerce sites generally don’t use the term “translation” to describe what they do.
