Oh dear! If ever there was an example of how not to translate a website it must be the London Eye website. It would seem that the Merlin Group clearly don’t care about their international visitors…

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The ‘Tele Scouter’, a recent invention from NEC due to launch in 2010, is a pair of glasses attached to a headset and mouthpiece, with a small projector that can transmit messages onto the retina of the user. It is intended for use in a customer service environment, allowing employees access to information regarding the client they are talking to.

Once the product is launched, NEC are intending to introduce a further function for the glasses, allowing instantaneous translation. During a multilingual conversation, both voices will be picked up, the dialogue translated, and sent back to the headset and projector. The messages will be shown in the user’s peripheral vision, allowing them to maintain eye contact with the person with whom they are having a conversation.
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Twitter is the latest company to use crowdsourcing to localise their website and interface - about time they localised it too, as in the arena of social networking, Twitter has been lagging behind other sites such as Facebook when it comes to reaching a multilingual audience…

So what is crowdsourcing exactly?

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A recent article in New Scientist reports on the imminent release of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from U.S. national control. ICANN is responsible for maintaining the various technical standards that make the Internet possible on a low level.

Under an Affirmation agreement with the U.S. department of commerce ICANN will not be coordinated by any specific government, allowing representatives from many countries to take part. The likely offshoot is that Internet standards will become more inclusive of Internet users outside America. For instance, the article reports that we might reasonably expect domain names to be available in Chinese and Arabic characters in little more than a year. They also report that current browsers cannot access domain names written in these scripts, which is quite right, but a reasonably small change I cannot see any major browser manufacturer delaying in releasing to their customers.

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Latest EU regulations demand that all packaging and instruction leaflets for pharmaceutical products and medical devices are translated into the official language of the country they are being exported to.

American companies in this sector who intend to export their products to Europe must comply with these regulations, and indeed should embrace multilingual packaging in order to compete with their European counterparts.

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I’ve been helping a client manage their PPC spend recently by training one of their team members. I don’t normally do this; it was just a favour to one of our best clients which happens to be a local company.

It took me back; I remembered the very early days when you’d pay 0.05$ per keyword word and could expect to be in the top 5 results. For most industries, those days are long gone. (more…)

International eMarketing12th November, 13.00 - 17.00

The Source, Meadowhall, Sheffield (£35)

Learn about ebusiness strategies to promote your business in non-English markets using the Internet.

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[caption id="attachment_1438" align="alignleft" width="166" caption="Take your share of the global market"][/caption]

According to a recent EU report, 2 of the main obstacles faced by UK businesses who are exporting for the first time are language and cultural barriers, and how best to promote their websites using SEO and online advertising.

The first step in trading internationally is to localise your website. This way, you can gain enquiries and orders from overseas customers with only a small investment - with even just one or two pages translated into foreign languages you can use your website to “test the water” in a number of countries at once, and see which ones gain you the most web traffic.

By monitoring the visitors to your localised webpages, you can choose the countries which warrant extra investment and focus on marketing your product or service there.

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[caption id="attachment_1410" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Top 10 Internet Languages "][/caption]

The remaining 8 top languages are all below 10%, with Arabic and Russian seeing the greatest growth since 2000. Perhaps predictably, as a percentage of language speakers who use the internet, Japan has the highest penetration wish a massive 75% of Japanese speakers accessing the web. German comes a close second with 68%, but the rest of the world has some way to go to catch up.

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[caption id="attachment_1392" align="aligncenter" width="568" caption="Europeans are buying more online as confidence increases and companies deliver a better user experience."][/caption]

As e-tailers prepare for another record Christmas period they should consider the changing trends in consumer confidence across Europe for new opportunities. Consumers are buying more frequently in every country in Europe, but as the pace of growth slows in the UK and competition stiffens, smart businesses will look to serve multilingual markets where consumerism grows faster and is less competitive.

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