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the Free CMSWire NewsletterContent isn’t what it used to be. Companies used to only have to manage contracts, proposals, documentation, and other standard business content. Today, in addition to those core internal documents, businesses have socially driven content such as online communities, email, websites and social media. That means blogs, tweets and other kinds of social media updates, as well as collaborative content tools like wikis, forums, and endless email attachments — to name just a few — all comprise a company’s content. In many cases, organizations employ a global, mobile workforce; this means not only that online content is growing, but also that it is growing in many different languages.
How can a company keep up? As anyone with a content management system (CMS) will tell you, managing the flood of content can be messy. Perhaps one of the most dramatic content snarls comes from translation and localization, or lack thereof. An estimated 99 percent of the content in the world hasn’t been translated (Common Sense Advisory, “Ranking of the Top 25 Translation Companies,” May 29, 2008).
Businesses don’t translate or localize the way they could because of what the Gilbane Group calls ‘language afterthought syndrome’ or “a pattern of treating language requirements as secondary considerations within content strategies and solutions.” (The Gilbane Group, “Suffering from Language Afterthought Syndrome?” September 4, 2009). The casualties of language afterthought syndrome — or, to put it another way, translation procrastination — are many: content is wasted rather than being reused during its lifecycle; customer support is costly and inefficient due to poor translation; language capacity is maxed out, limiting bottom lines as companies expand globally, and hurting multi-channel customer communications, according to Gilbane.
The risks of translation procrastination don’t stop with a business’s internal struggle. If a company’s website is a key driver of sales, avoiding translation leaves a gaping market hole where a company could be selling products and services. Worldwide, Internet users spend $448 billion buying goods and services online, according to Common Sense Advisory. Yet only 31 percent of online users use the Internet in English, and that proportion is declining. Seventy percent of global users visit websites in their own language. In the EU alone, nine out of ten users would prefer to visit a website in their own language, and a whopping 42 percent of users would never buy a product in a language other than their own (European Commission. “User language preferences online.” May 2011. Web).
Technology Meets the Challenge
With all the potential benefits of translation and localization — and the pitfalls of procrastinating — what’s the holdup? I believe the roots of the problem lie in old technological limitations. In the past, the only way to get things translated was through a professional, at about 23 cents per word. That’s more than it costs to create content itself in many cases. Companies, in an attempt to save money, waited until the last second to translate and only when it seemed there was no other option. As a result, translation remained a secondary post-process, rather than an integrated and essential component to global strategy.
That is now a decision that companies don’t have to make anymore. With the advent of cloud computing and crowdsourcing, it is now possible to translate content according to its value to a company. For example, tweets and blog comments, while they may be important for communications, do not carry as much overall business value as a company’s homepage. There’s no point in unleashing an expensive professional translator on those tweets — but there is a price to pay for not translating them at all.
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