Multilingual Web Marketing A News and Information Resource Covering Internet marketing, Translation and Localization

A similar product to chatstat described below is SpeakLike. Launched just last month this is a real time, instant messaging, service using a mixture of automatic machine translation (MT) and human translators to edit the results. The service is currently only available in English, Spanish and Chinese but other languages are to be added soon. This is a great development and I wish SpeakLike all the best of success.

There is a huge demand for a real time native quality translated chat service and I have often wondered why the major chat software companies like MSN, ICQ, Skype etc. don’t offer a similar professional quality translation service themselves. It has to come; the first major player to do it will have introduced a killer app that takes the Web another giant stride down the road.

MT systems today are developing and being enhanced all the time and, in my estimation, a top end system now should give at least 50% accuracy / usability for general subjects. This basic translation then edited by a professional translator should deliver excellent results for most chat needs.

The only negatives that I can currently see with such a system are to do with confidentiality and privacy. I don’t have the figures, but I am sure that the majority of chat conversations in the world are to do with dating sites or personal conversations that the participants wouldn’t wish to share with an anonymous human translator! However, like I said, that is just my feeling – I don’t have the stats to confirm or deny it.

That leaves business use and this is where confidentiality is also an important issue but one that can be dealt with using standard confidentiality agreements that translation companies normally use all the time. It goes without saying that if a business can have real time native quality chat with clients and potential clients around the world it is an amazing opportunity and, once again, shows the power of the web for marketing and overcoming international boundaries.

ChatStat have introduced an interesting product that gives you the ability to conduct live chat with both website visitors and any of the supported IM clients (AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, GoogleTalk, and Skype) using a familiar instant messenger interface. Best of all – it’s multilingual!

They have joined forces with the machine translation software supplier LEC to create the first client interaction and IM aggregator that can translate many languages on the fly in simultaneous text conversations. The Language Translation feature expands a user’s ability to communicate in real time using as many as 16 major languages and over 120 vertical market dictionaries at the click of a button to deliver highly accurate translations.

Examples of its use include web visitors chatting with operators, inter-company secured instant messaging, and instant messenger buddy to buddy chat.

Today I want to ask you a couple of questions; are your online sales currently slow or disappointing? Despairing of gaining an advantage over the mass of competition out there? I understand the feeling! But have you ever considered how many websites are available in languages other than English? Amazingly the current figure is still less than 5%, yet there is a constantly growing demand in other countries for the information and products on offer!

Non-English online markets are growing at a much faster rate than English speaking ones as the Internet continues to penetrate the world at an astonishing speed. The world total of Internet users has now passed the one billion mark yet only 30% are English speakers. That’s right, 70% of Internet users are non-English speakers! Let’s take a little closer look at the current most popular languages after English. Chinese comes in second with 132 million users, then Japanese with 86 million, Spanish 80 million, German 56 million, French 40 million, Korean 34 million, Portuguese 32 million, Italian 29 million and Russian with 24 million users.

When you look at this list you can see that it includes some of the richest and most developed (and developing) nations in the world. Wouldn’t you like to take yourself out of the increasing loop of competition in the United States, Canada, Britain etc. and just plug yourself straight into these wealthy and ever expanding new markets? And don’t forget, there is always a delay between something being developed in the English speaking world and its take up elsewhere. In France for example, this delay can be up to six months afterwards. This is where Internet entrepreneurs who have the foresight to translate their products and websites first will make a killing. And in the process establish market dominance for any other products at a later date.

With a translated website you also have some major search engine advantages which I have not yet covered. The primary advantage is that your search engine listings will multiply! If you translate your site into just one other language your listings will double, and quadruple if you translate into four for example. The more you translate, you more listings you get. Search engines will visit your website more frequently as they can detect that your pages are written in different languages. You will not only get listed in all the language specific versions of the major search engines and their feeds, but local country specific ones as well.

Having multilingual versions of a website also makes it a lot easier to gain better search engine rankings. Most English only websites are now fully optimized and the competition is advancing all the time. Foreign language SEO is still in its infancy however and your website still has time to gain a high rank with a minimum of time and investment. But time is running out! A good ranking in a major non-English language search engine or version of Google can generate a huge number of hits.

Is Google AdSense an important element of your website and domain monetization strategy? Have you ever thought about exploiting its multilingual capabilities? AdSense automatically detects the languages of your web pages and displays the corresponding adverts in up to 21 different languages.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the only really safe way to improve the performance of traffic script generated or doorway pages is to have them translated into other languages. This is because search engine filter algorithms are currently a lot less developed when dealing with non-English pages.

Given the amount of English language competition on the Internet translation may well be the only competitive advantage that you have left. Don’t waste it! In business you have to put all the advantages your way that you possibly can and having a multilingual website is the key to stepping over the competition and establishing a solid base for the future of your business.

Q: What are the best languages to translate my websites and products into?

A: If you are just starting out with globalizing your products and websites I always recommend starting with either all or some of French, Italian, German and Spanish (this combination is known as FIGS in the translation industry). This is because these languages have the widest number of translators available and are the easiest to manage and, in general, the cheapest to translate into. The natural progression on from FIGS is to using Chinese, Japanese and Korean (known as CJK!). If you were to combine all these languages with Russian and Portuguese you would have almost 90% coverage of the web´s most used languages!

Q: How long does it take to translate a website?

A: For a typical marketing mini-site or average sized website the turn around is normally very quick and the translation can be completed in just a few days. Most translation companies are available for urgent jobs but, of course, have to charge extra for this. If the chosen languages are less straightforward or the subject matter is complex this, too, will add a small amount to the time spent on translation and verification.

Q: I can’t speak any other languages! How will I communicate with my new customers, affiliates and suppliers?

A: By translated email. You will often find that many people that contact you do speak English but prefer to buy in their own language. To gain the gist of an email you can certainly use web based or machine translation software but for the best quality and seamless integration into your online business I recommend a professional translation service. A translation company can help you set up a secure and confidential redirect between your server and their translators, who then deliver to you a translated email. You write back using the same system in reverse. The result is that you never see an email that is not in English!

Search engine optimization (SEO) has now become a central requirement to any online presence. It is safe to say that SEO in English has reached saturation point as people strive to out compete each other and the search engines to gain higher rankings! Multilingual SEO however is still relatively new as the major search engine companies, most of whom are based in the USA, have been focused on developing their English markets and offerings. This is certainly beginning to change but compared to English fantastic opportunities still await those that are quick enough to undertake SEO in foreign languages!

An important factor is that, in English, search engines will crawl your entire site and analyze its overall content from a ranking perspective. In foreign languages, many search engines are only programmed to analyze the content of one, two or three pages per language. In other words, only three pages at most will be considered for the ranking eligibility of your multilingual websites!

This is one of the primary reasons why it is important to only work with experienced SEO experts who are based in the countries where your chosen languages are spoken. Their knowledge of local markets and which keywords to use and structure is essential. Their close collaboration with your chosen translation services supplier is your guarantee that the foreign language pages you optimize will be ranked as highly as possible.