Global Content Strategy

Val Swisher

• Publisher: XML Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781492002086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Systèmes de gestion de contenu

When you want to engage customers, you must have great content that speaks to them in their language. Success in foreign markets takes research, planning, and sensitivity regarding the culture, expectations, and buying habits of each target customer. Because of this, more and more companies are translating more content into more languages every day. Global Content Strategy: A Primer gives you the information you need to get started navigating the global content landscape. From tips on making your global content more accessible to details on how to ensure that your words and images are prepared for the world, this book provides information every global organization needs to be successful.

Global

Content Strategy

A Primer

Val Swisher

Foreword

In 2003, when I published the first edition of The Web Globalization Report Card[Yunker, 2014], there were 700 million Internet users, which at the time seemed like a lot. The majority of these Internet users were English speakers, so companies didn’t support many languages through their websites and other marketing channels. In fact, the leading global websites supported an average of just 12 languages.

Today, more than a decade later, the Internet landscape has changed dramatically. There are now 2.5 billion Internet users, of which fewer than 25 percent are native English speakers. So any company with global aspirations has no choice but to support a significant number of languages. This is why the websites of the leading global brands now support an average of 28 languages.

That’s right. The average number of languages on a global website is now 28.

For a growing number of companies, 28 languages is way too few. Companies like American Express, Honda, and 3M support more than 40 languages. And a handful of companies – such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Google – support more than 70 languages.

So what does this mean for those of us charged with developing global content strategies?

It means we need strategies that are global by design.

Global Content Strategy: A Primer, by Val Swisher, provides you with an excellent start.

From developing a global content strategy to creating world-ready visuals to managing translation workflow, this guide will help you answer important questions, such as these:

• What is transcreation, and when should I use it?
• How do I direct web users to localized content?
• How do I create English-language content so that it is more efficiently and effectively translated?

Global Content Strategy provides high-level best practices to help any organization with global aspirations get started on the right foot and avoid costly mistakes.

—­John Yunker, founder of Byte Level Research, is the author of The Art of the Global Gateway[Yunker, 2010] and The Web Globalization Report Card[Yunker, 2014]. Since 2000, he has consulted with many of the world’s leading brands and helped pioneer best practices in multilingual web design.

Preface

The global economy matters more and more to American-based businesses. The U.S. Small Business Administration, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, all report that 95 percent of consumers live outside the United States.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce makes the point emphatically, stating that markets outside of the U.S. represent 80 percent of the world’s purchasing power and 92 percent of the world’s economic growth. In 2012, the total value of goods and services exported from the U.S. was over $2 trillion dollars.

We’re not just in Kansas anymore.

While humans everywhere may be fundamentally the same, assuming that everyone is just like you is likely to backfire. Succeeding in foreign markets takes a great deal of research, planning, and sensitivity regarding the culture, expectations, and buying habits of each target customer group. As Deloitte Touch Tohmatsu Limited put it in their 2012 report, Global Powers of the Consumer Products Industry:

"...understanding the consumer in each of these markets (and in some cases in each region within a market) is a task that cannot be underestimated."

When you want to engage customers, you need to have great content that speaks to them in their own language. Beware the temptation to assume that global audiences speak and read English.

I hear this all the time, “We don’t need to translate. All our customers can read English. English is the language of the world. Everyone speaks English.”

Well, no.

Here are some statistics from Wikipedia:

• Of the 7 billion people living on earth, only about 375 million – 3.6 percent of the world’s population – speak English as their first language.
• More people speak Mandarin Chinese or Spanish as their first language than any other language.
• The number of people who speak English as a second language is estimated at anywhere from 470 million to over a billion.

Clearly, not everyone speaks English.

An important part of your global content strategy is making sure that you provide appropriate content, use appropriate methods, and deliver appropriate languages to your worldwide customers. Providing untranslated content to foreign markets can be a revenue-limiting mistake at best and a public-relations catastrophe at worst.

Take Coca-Cola. They had difficulties expanding into China. Why? The name Coca-Cola was first read as ke-kou-ke-la, which means, depending on the Chinese dialect, “bite the wax tadpole” or “female horse stuffed with wax.” Fortunately for Coca-Cola, their marketing team found a phonetic equivalent – ko-kou-ko-le – which means “happiness in the mouth.”

More and more companies realize the value of translating content for their foreign customers. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, many companies start translating content without a plan. That’s the bad news. When companies have no plan, their translated content grows haphazardly, not strategically. Rarely do I find a company that starts out with a plan for managing content in 84 languages. Yet, the number of people tasked with this kind of job grows every day.

As companies add languages, the quality of the source content takes on increased significance. Source English that is poorly written or highly colloquial may be decipherable to native English speakers, but its translation often makes no sense. When source quality – including translatability – is ignored, the results run the gamut from embarrassing to bankrupting.

Without a plan, the cost associated with global content skyrockets. As more content is translated into more languages, more money is spent – and wasted – on the task. Common Sense Advisory puts the size of the global translation market at over $37 billion.

Every company I work with is looking for ways to lower translation costs. In fact, for many companies, the management of multilingual content has reached a financial and administrative breaking point. These companies need a strategy, a methodology for organizing, managing, creating, delivering, and distributing content all over the wor...