Recent news from the Far East and Europe that several economies are moving out of recession seemed to come as something of a surprise to a number of economists. To date China, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, France, Germany, Portugal, and Greece have all reported figures suggesting they’re on their way out of recession.
Yet our friends at Google are now sitting on probably the most accurate economic barometer of all. Google’s management can see on a daily or, at worst, monthly basis how the world’s major economies are doing. Even looking at the figures Google releases produces some fascinating insights.
Bearing in mind that Google isn’t first in some world economies that are emerging from the “downturn” with vigor, the company’s international sales figures, when compared with the U.S. and U.K. — as released by them — are striking.
This morning in Dubai, Yahoo! begins learning a new language – Arabic. We’ve just announced our intent to acquire Maktoob.com, the leading online community in the Arab world. To put this in perspective, Maktoob reaches one in every three people online throughout the region –- or 16.5 million people. This will be Yahoo!’s biggest geographic expansion in years.
This deal is part of Yahoo!’s broader strategy to grow our international business, particularly in emerging markets. In many countries, vast populations — and advertisers — are just starting to come online. The potential is tremendous. Yahoo! has a large and growing audience in these markets today, and our acquisition of Maktoob represents the kind of investment we’re making to cater to the needs of these promising regions.
We plan to join forces with the Maktoob team, the strongest in the region, to create locally relevant content, services, and programming. That’s no easy task when you consider the differences between countries like UAE, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But we’re committed to literally translating our winning formula for this growing market in many ways, including through locally-based editorial teams.
Initially, we’ll plan to introduce Arabic versions of Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Search, and our homepage and then eventually local versions of properties like News, Sports, and Finance. We’ll also focus on creating content and services tailored to the region. No other global company has made this kind of investment in local relevance for the Arab world.
Arabs are vastly underserved by today’s Internet offerings. The World Bank estimates that there are 320 million Arabic speakers around the globe, yet less than one per cent of online content is written in their language (despite a vibrant Arabic blogosphere). We have a big opportunity to meet this growing demand, and we think Yahoo!, building on Maktoob’s local expertise, brings the scale and heft to draw many more people online in the region –- and we plan to give them compelling reasons to log on.
We also recognize the Middle East is deeply complex, a complexity mirrored in the online world, and that it will present certain challenges. As an Internet pioneer in the emerging markets, we’ve learned important lessons and we’re committed to responsible global engagement. This means being sensitive to local laws, customs, and norms while also protecting and promoting the rights of our users. We believe our engagement in the Middle East can be a positive force for people by increasing access to information, supporting a thriving marketplace for the exchange of ideas, and bridging local, regional, and international communities.
It’s easy to forget the fastest growing Internet audiences are in the emerging markets. That’s not lost on us. We’re passionate about growing our presence in places like Southeast Asia, India, Latin America, and Africa. And we can’t wait to yodel in the Middle East.
In an effort to keep things brief here on Yodel, we have provided a link to the press release and we have also created an informational site that should answer many of your questions.
Keith Nilsson
Senior Vice President, Emerging Markets
Clownfish Design Ltd, an international provider of websites and business softwares solutions has just completed the release of the Corporate Mailer, a multilingual online resource for emailing campaigns.
“Corporate mailer has been totally re-built as a web-based software available in 3 languages (English, French and Spanish) as a result of our constant objectives to offer international services to our clients” said Uldaric Bertinotti, Business Manager.
The new massive mailing software allows any registered company to use and resell Corporate mailer services to any client, even in a different country, by creating their email message in the receiver’s language, importing contacts and analyzing the campaign statistics thanks to detailed, automatically generated reports.
South Africa is guaranteed tourism in the summer of 2010 as it plays host to the biggest sporting event in the world - the World Cup. With thousands of foreign fans coming through the airports in search of football, fun and a fantastic holiday what are local companies doing to ensure they get the business? Have they started implementing multilingual strategies on their websites to grap the attention of all the fans who will be doing some research online for hotels, restaurants, safari parks or anything else? Or are they doing nothing and assuming all these people will come to them?
This is the question being asked by Kwintessential (Africa) in its online survey of the South African tourism industry. If you own a business that is related to tourism in South Africa why not take part and get automatically entered into the draw for a free websitetranslation?
Develop content for your Web site with an international clientele in mind. For instance, be sensitive to cultural nuance, use universal images and metaphors, and develop a slogan that reflects your global outreach, says Ayse Oge, president of Ultimate Trade, an international consultancy based in Encino, Calif. “Include testimonials from internationally known prominent people who use your products. If you have been written up in a well-known publication, include a short piece on it on your front page,” she says.
All these factors will enhance your credibility and help you avoid major blunders. But you’ll need more than an appealing Web site to find and keep international customers, says Peter Zapf, president of GlobalSources.com (GSOL), a consulting and outsourcing firm based in Singapore. “Keep in mind—in addition to the Web content—customer service, logistics, and product delivery and payment,” he says.
Smooth out issues ahead of time with customs duties and shipping procedures, and include UPS (UPS) and FedEx (FDX) international shipping rates on your site in a drop-down box, so your clients don’t get sticker shock when they check out, Oge says.
Be aware that selling outside of your country exposes you to higher transaction fees and a higher likelihood of fraud, Zapf says: “At a minimum, you need to have good fraud management practices in place in order to minimize potential charge backs.”
When it comes to multilingual Web site content, remember that if you include it, you’ll also need a multilingual customer service team to answer telephone inquiries and reply to e-mail. “The key to attracting clients is having content localized for each global market, but this can be costly to maintain, particularly for smaller companies,” says Susan Peters, senior director of corporate marketing and Web strategy at ILOG, a software firm headquartered in Silicon Valley and Paris and recently acquired by IBM (IBM).
The tool will make it easier for web users to understand blogs, websites and messages written in Farsi by Iranians protesting the recent election results.
Google Translate can now convert text from Farsi (Persian) in to English, and from English in to Persian. Google said it was working hard to quickly provide Farsi support for the other 40 languages featured in its translationservice.
“We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran,” said Google in a statement. “Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone’s access to information.”
The search giant warned that the translation service was still a work in progress, and was not perfect. “We’re launching this service quickly, so it may perform slowly at times,” warned Google. “We’ll keep a close watch, and if it breaks, we’ll restore service as quickly as we can.”
Having an English-only website is no longer sufficient. For those under the illusion that their potential customers are all surfing the web in English, it is time to realize that the language of the web is multilingual.
People prefer to search and interact online in their own language: it’s natural and comfortable. And the more relaxed a potential customer is when they’re browsing an online store, the more likely they will make a purchase. That is, of course, if they even find your site in the first place.
International online visibility is becoming a major priority for online businesses. From big names like Universal Music Group, to the smaller niche e-stores realising their massive potential for sales in relatively untapped markets with newly acquired online access, businesses are cashing in on their ability to be seen online.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is not a new thing. But international SEO is its newest evolution, and it’s causing a major stir in the online world.
By having experts write new content in their target market’s native language, building key links, and setting up valuable, culturally-appropriate pay-per-click campaigns, businesses are now able to tap into markets they never before dreamed possible.
The trick is understanding that every culture searches differently. Learning how those cultures search is a complex process, but the knowledge is invaluable. For example, knowing that French people tend to misspell the keyword “holiday” as “holliday” can be a key factor for an online travel agency’s pay-per-click campaign.
Gmail, Google’s email service, has launched Message Translation, a service which automatically translates 41 languages.
The feature integrates Google Translate technology into Gmail and will appear within Gmail Labs as an experiment called “Message Translation”. It will be available to Gmail users around the world.
Message Translation will automatically translate email conversations between 41 languages, allowing people from different countries to conduct entire conversations in multiple languages. Each participant will be able to read the emails in whichever language they prefer.
TED — a collection of events and media properties owned the nonprofit Sapling Foundation — has gone to the trouble of translating its archive of thought-leader talks in various languages.
Sponsored by Nokia, the TED Open Translation Project bolsters so-called TED Talks with subtitles, time-coded transcripts, and the ability for volunteers to translate any talk into any language.
The project was also designed to enhance the accessibility of the talks for both the hearing-impaired, and search engines, which can now index the full transcript of a talk.
For example, searching on Google for “green roof” will ultimately lead you to the moment in architect William McDonough’s talk when he discusses his green roof project for Ford’s River Rouge plant, and also the moment in Majora Carter”s talk when she speaks of her green roof project in the South Bronx. Transcripts will index in all available languages.
Founded as a conference in 1984, TED — which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design — was acquired by Chris Anderson’s Sapling Foundation in 2001, and has since expanded to include an international conference, and various media initiatives, including TED.com.
More than 200 volunteer translators have already contributed, allowing the site to launch with 300 translations in 40 languages.
Over the course of the past year, many companies with international Web sites have approached my company. They were looking for the “easy” way to optimize their sites for each country. You might be surprised by the issues that many of these large companies face.
When I hear people comment that “SEO isn’t that difficult…just build a Web site that is search engine friendly and that’s pretty much it,” these are the kinds of issues that tell me, “No, it’s not that easy.” There are little things, here and there, that if you weren’t a practicing SEO, you may not take into account.
Here are a few challenges that companies with an international Web presence face, and some advice for how to create an optimal Web presence that can do well in international search engines.
Domains
When it comes to doing things “the right way” for SEO, it all begins with domain selection. That’s true whether it’s for one Web site to be promoted in the United States, or for a group of Web sites you’re optimizing to promote your business internationally.
For international SEO, you really should have a TLD (top level domain) for each country you’re targeting. This is more complicated than you might think. Many countries mandate that you have an actual physical business location in that country before you can obtain a TLD. To gain a German (.de) top-level-domain, for example, you must operate an office in Germany.
images and metaphors, and develop a slogan that reflects your global outreach, says Ayse Oge, president of Ultimate Trade, an international consultancy based in Encino, Calif. “Include testimonials from internationally known prominent people who use your products. If you have been written up in a well-known publication, include a short piece on it on your front page,” she says.
ke into account.
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