TAKING YOUR COMPANY TO THE WORLD: HOW TO EXPAND TO INTERNATIONAL MARKETS
Communication is the cornerstone of global expansion. It provides ample opportunities and challenges worth learning and implementing.
By Julio García
Increasingly, more companies are expanding globally. As globalization accelerates, there is a pressing need to expand beyond linguistic limits to reach a more significant number of consumers.
Undoubtedly, high-quality translations are the ticket to internationalization; they open the door to new opportunities, potential customers, and mutually beneficial relationships.
At the same time, the more languages a company’s content and promotional communications are translated into, and the more business contacts can be achieved.
These measures favor new sales and agreements, increasing business growth chances.
With that in mind, how do you assess translation needs to reach new markets while optimizing the cost-benefit of the associated investment?
Such assessment would depend on the particular needs of a given company. This article will focus on companies looking to expand into other languages.
Getting started with international expansion
When a company doesn’t have any international connections, they have to make such connections through a globally visible medium, such as an institutional website.
If a company has a website in your native language, translating it into the specific languages of potential customers is key to accessing new markets through high-quality content.
The indicators listed below are worth noting to recognize this importance:
● 9 out of 10 international users will ignore your product if it is not in their native language. (Source: https://www.nimdzi.com/project-underwear-a-study-of-online-buyer-behavior-and-how-language-affects-user-choice/#:~:text=Nimdzi's%20data%20show%20that%209,in%20our%20increasingly%20interconnected%20world.)
● According to data from the European Commission, only 18% of Internet users in European countries buy products online in foreign languages. English accounts for 60% of online content. (Source: https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language)
● 44% of European Internet users feel they are missing interesting information because web pages are not in a language they understand. (Source: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_11_556).
With nearly 1.5 billion people whose native or foreign language is English, many international brands have made English their primary lingua franca.
Nonetheless, the text still needs to be adapted and translated into other languages.
Through a more objective-budget- and target-audience-based in-depth analysis, the best language(s) can be determined for this purpose.
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As for costs, to get a basic understanding of this aspect, the cost of translating a website depends on the wordcount of each page. For this purpose, tools are available to analyze a company’s website and calculate the number of words to translate.
Suppose you know how many words the website contains because it has little content. In that case, you can independently calculate how much translating into all major languages will cost with a vague idea of the rate per word.
Social Media: Building Momentum
Social media ads are very effective, among other digital marketing resources.
“Social marketing” is building momentum with an increased focus on working with customers and on social media reviews that convey it. It has the advantage that potential buyers carefully seek the opinions of people who have already used the product or service. And, for the most part, they only search in their native language.
Translating into foreign languages is not only valid for customers but also for sellers themselves. After all, the ad market is developing at a much faster pace worldwide. And from it, you can get ideas and tools that may not yet have caught the attention of the audience in your country.
This is extremely important for your company because the market is developing at an unprecedented pace.
Product/Service Brochures
Another medium — and perhaps the most traditionally known for dissemination — is product brochures.
The main distinguishing feature of translating product brochures into foreign languages is to be as accurate as possible. Each translated text element or graphic has to be 100% consistent with the meaning of the original product and description.
Translating any product brochure must accurately describe all actions indicated in the original document.
User safety or the appropriate actions of employees or other company services are key factors that depend on translation accuracy. That is why you need to be very careful when using machine translation. Although it can certainly save time and money, it can also be inaccurate or cause mistakes in the description of the translated product.
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