Hosted by the American Marketing Association with presentations from Smartling, Common Sense Advisory, Paltalk and MeetMe
Your digital presence offers a great experience for website visitors and mobile users alike. A lot more people could be enjoying that great experience too - and engaging with you - if only they could access all the content in their native language.
But there's a problem: traditional ways of translating and localizing content were not made for your dynamic web and mobile properties. So how do you provide a global audience with a multi-lingual, culturally relevant experience without compromising quality or features?
Our global economy demands a new approach to translation, one that relies on cloud technology, transparent workflows, contextual editing capabilities and rapid deployment across multiple web properties and mobile apps.
Join Smartling as we discuss translation for the global marketplace, get the latest research from Common Sense Advisory and hear about real-world success from PalTalk and MeetMe.
You will learn:
- How a multi-lingual web presence correlates to business success.
- Best practices to prepare your digitial content for the global marketplace.
- How PalTalk and MeetMe have expanded their global reach balancing the importance of quality translation with the need to launch quickly.
Speakers:
- Ben Sargent, Globalization Strategist, Common Sense Advisory
- Jack Welde, CEO, Smartling
- Richard Schaer, VP of Strategy, PalTalk
- Rich Friedman, VP of Engineering, MeetMe
3. The new context for global marketing
Exploding middle class
– Middle-class households in Africa will double by 2020
– India middle class will rise from 150M to 600M by 2030
– 2 billion people will join global middle class by 2030
Growth of information consumer
– Access to internet changes our engagement with content
– How we learn about products and services
– How we share what we know with others
– The end of demographics
– The proliferation of persona-based marketing
Expanding number of big languages on the web
– 12 languages needed to reach 80% of web users
– 13 languages to address 90% of world online wallet
– Long tail of languages now coming into effect
– Social media marketing will grow to 30, 40, 50+ languages
4.
5.
6. Success metrics for 2,409 most prominent
websites
Alexa top 500 global sites
– Ranks websites on daily visitors and monthly page views
Forbes global 2000
– Weighs sales, profits, assets, and market value
Fortune 500
– U.S. companies ranked solely on revenue
Interbrand 100 best global brands
– Looks at financial performance of branded products or services,
the role of the brand in purchase decisions, and brand strength
Further reading: “Global Website Assessment Index”
9. How languages correlate to business success
Best-in-class websites offer more languages
– Bigger companies
– The most popular websites
– The most valuable brands
– Source: “Multilingual Websites” (Oct12)
F500 companies adding content led to higher revenue
and profits
– Higher revenue
– Higher profit margin
– Source: “Translation at Fortune 500 Companies” (Mar12)
10. Companies often invest in the wrong languages
Underserved
languages
Interbrand Not Interbrand 2012 2012 WOW
100 Ranked Popularity AQ WOW AQ Rank Rank
Popularity Popularity Rank Rank Rank Variance Variance
Arabic 27% 7% 33 6 11 -27 -22
Persian
6% 1% 42 15 20 -27 -22
(Farsi)
Indonesian 20% 5% 35 10 24 -25 -11
Hindi 2% 2% 46 16 37 -30 -9
Hebrew 35% 3% 29 37 21 8 -8
Norwegian 51% 9% 21 41 15 20 -6
Swedish 56% 10% 18 28 13 10 -5
Kazakh 3% 0% 44 51 39 7 -5
Japanese 73% 28% 6 4 2 -2 -4
Dutch 65% 15% 12 18 9 6 -3
11. Marketers should base planning decisions on
real world data
1. Inventory current website language offerings.
2. Benchmark current language offerings against industry
and regional norms.
3. Assess both the quantity and quality of online
populations markets for revenue potential.
4. Take into account gaps in the knowledge of your
competitors.
12. Thank you.
Benjamin B. Sargent
ben@commonsenseadvisory.com
Twitter: @b2sargent
Research: www.commonsenseadvisory.com
Blog: www.globalwatchtower.com
Insight for global market leaders
14. The Holy Grail of Translation
• High quality
• Affordable
• Rapid turnaround
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15. The Demands of an Agile World
• Smaller sets of content
• Rapid turnaround requirements
• 20+ languages
• Web, mobile, document translation
• Multiple resources: translation agencies, freelance
translators, crowd
• Many stakeholders: internal, local partners, power users
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16. TRADITIONAL AGILE
TRANSLATIONS TRANSLATION
Static documents Web, Mobile, Mobile Web, Mobile Apps
File based translation Cloud based translation
Manual string extraction Automated string extraction
Management by spreadsheets APIs / workflow automation
Re-do’s Contextual editing and Translation Memory
Agency brokered, expensive translators Crowdsource. Professional. Or both.
Phased and infrastructure intensive Global delivery
Batch translation, weekly or monthly updates AGILE LOCALIZATION
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17. Agile Translation in
Practice: A 5-Step Process
1. Process content via APIs
2. Use customizable but structured translation workflows
3. Contextualize your content
4. Translate using modern, web-based tools
5. Automatically deploy completed translations
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18. Step 1: Process content via APIs
Accept all major document and content types, including:
•Documents
- Word, Excel, InDesign, etc.
•Localization files
- GetText (.po), Java Properties, YAML, iOS strings,
Android XML, etc.
•Structured content
- HTML, XML, JSON, XLIFF
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19. Step 2: Place content into workflow
• Customizable, disciplined workflows
• Engage multiple resources
- Translators
- Editors
- Internal reviewers (marketing, legal, bilinguals)
- Local partners
- Power users
• Automatic assignment based on desired strategy
(translator preference, turnaround, cost, etc.) 7
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20. Step 3: Get Context!
• Provide translator instructions
• Provide placeholder hints
- {0} by {1}
• Provide string-level feedback
• Provide actual context
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27. Agile Translation for the Global
Marketplace
• Starts with the cloud
• Modern, web-based tools
• String-level parsing, translation and collaboration
• Scalability and usability
• High-quality, affordable translation with rapid
turnaround
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29. About the company
1998 Paltalk launched
150 million Millions 100,000
registered of active simultaneously
members users online
The world’s largest
live video chat community
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30. Translation Opportunity
• Large established non-US communities
• Acquisitions in regional markets
• English-only web presence meant that
Paltalk was not fully taking advantage of
international growth opportunities
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31. Translation Management Selection Criteria
Crowdsourcing to Phased, iterative Interface that
keep down costs approach to allows translators
and engage move to work
communities fast in key in context with
markets actual page views
32. Zero to 15 languages with quality and speed
Arabic, English, French, Using Smartling Smartling-certified
German, Hindi, Indonesian, crowdsourcing professional
Italian, Japanese, Korean, management, translators were used
Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Spanish and to refine content for
Tagalog, Turkish and Vietnamese went French, Hindi, Italian,
Vietnamese live within weeks Japanese,
Korean and Tagalog
33. Smartling solutions
Smartling Translation Smartling Global
Management System Delivery Network
Management dashboards Automatic capture and delivery
In-context editing Secure, reliable performance
Localized content
Custom workflows
Robust analytics
34. More activity, lower acquisition costs
Online conversion Customer Global Crowdsourcing
rates improved acquisition costs communities proved an
dramatically down by 40 percent more active on effective
vs. paid advertising the service engagement
tool
35. Future plans
Drive increased Improve from Mobile
engagement in translation to
multiple languages local relevance
37. Who is MeetMe?
• Public market leader for social
discovery.
• We make meeting people fun
through social games and apps,
monetized through both
advertising and virtual currency.
• Every day, we help millions of
people around the world make
new friends whether on the web
or their mobile phones
• Billions of web and mobile pages
served monthly.
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38. Why Translate?
• myYearbook + Quepasa =
MeetMe
- Supporting North and South
America
- Moving to single platform
• Growing beyond the Americas
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39. Translation Challenges
• Complex, dynamic website and
mobile apps using many
technologies
• Need to leverage existing
infrastructure without recoding
- Need to rapidly extract strings for
translation
• Multiple development
environments and fast-moving
release cycles
• Need to fully integrate content
translation and development
process
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40. MeetMe is “Thinking Local” to be
Global
• How is our development process
going to change?
• Partnered with Enlaso and
Smartling to integrate people and
technology.
• Integrated translation
management through all
environments.
- Supporting all developer sandbox
environments
• Supports testing languages as
early in the process as required.
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41. Extending your development team
• We need to work with Smartling
as an extension of our
development and operations
team.
• Leverage Translation
Management System and Global
Delivery Network
• Internationalization and
Localization becomes overlay on
agile process
• Ability to make our APIs
localizable
- Important for web and mobile.
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