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Is your website accessible
worldwide?
If you have a website, your business is
accessible to millions of potential consumers worldwide 24 hours a day, every
day. However, if the contents of the site are in English only, you are excluding
a significant percentage of the world's population who either do understand
English, or prefer to interact with websites that offer content in their local
language. So, what can you do to make your website truly global? Here are a few
tips:
Translate the contents of your site into
the major languages of trade for your particular product or service. If your
site is large and the translation price tag exceeds your internet budget,
consider translating a summary of the most important sections of your website. For a sample of this access
http://www.intersolinc.com.
- If you are contemplating automated translation, keep in
mind that a software program that renders output that requires no post-editing
does not yet exist. Unedited, the copy may sound awkward and even comical to
your intended audience. Also, there is a wide difference in the quality of the
translations produced by higher-end versus lower-end packages. Some automated
translation systems can "learn", so the quality of the translation of similar
text improves as you add more of your business-specific terminology to the
glossary.
- Another useful translation tool is Translation Memory,
which often serves as the front-end for some automated translation systems.
Translation Memory facilitates the management and reuse of previously
translated text. Under ideal conditions and working with similar text,
the percentage reuse can add up to as much as 50 to 60. Another useful feature
of some translation memory packages is the ability to separate HTML code from
text, so the format of a web page is not disturbed during translation. After
translation, the text is merged back with the HTML code. If all goes well,
after a quality control check and a few minor adjustments, the file will be
ready for uploading to the site.
- If you have a multilingual product catalog, consider adding
it to your website and making it interactive. If you offer a large number of
products, you may want to provide a quick search form so your customers can
easily find the product that interests them. It is possible now to enable
multilingual searches so customers can enter words in their own languages,
even if they speak Japanese, Chinese and other Asian languages that require
the two-byte character set.
- Once your catalog is online, you can also make it possible
for worldwide consumers to place orders for selected items using a Shopping
Cart application.
- If you want to extend to your customers the convenience of
credit card shopping, you need to make them feel safe about releasing their
credit card information over the Internet. For this you can ask your current
IP if they offer secure transactions, or access.
- If you have a toll free number, it is now possible to
interact with your customers on the telephone over the Internet, while they
are looking at your web pages. You can even push special web pages to
the caller as needed to clarify a product feature, sign a contract, etc. All
of this is possible at the click of an icon that enables customers to access
your call center for an interactive conversation.
These are just a few suggestions that will help you to
increase your share of the international market. Although English is still the
dominant language, the Internet's non-English speaking population continues to
grow and new technology is making it easier to reach them with
language-appropriate materials.
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