Tork Marketing

It is a very exciting time for businesses. Becoming visible nationally is one thing, but being visible world wide is even better. Think of all of the business that you never even dreamed of capturing, it’s sooooo exciting. So what do we need to do?

First off let’s decide if we’re going to hire a person, or implement a translating tool. Obviously the tools will be cheaper than the person, so for most smaller companies the tools will be the best selection. Now we have decided that we are going to use a tool to translate our content. Now we need to decide if we’ll use real-time translation, or create a second (or even third, fourth and fifth – we can translate our website into every language of the world… my hairs are standing on end just thinking about all of the business this can create) website in our newly selected language. Google has a great real-time translation tool, but it has one big problem in Internet Explorer it will not remember that it is supposed to be translating your pages (google states that it’s a conflict between native javascript that you have on your website and google’s translation tool javascript – but I’ve tried implementing the translation tool on a site with no native javascript and it still didn’t work), when you move from page to page. So every page you land on, you’ll have to select the language you want to translate it into every time you hit a new page (that’s irritating). So just to make things consistent and reliable the decision is made to create a second website in the new language.

Second big decision is which language to translate it into? Hmm, let’s pick Chinese, since we know that our products could be very useful over there. So we now use an application to translate all of our web pages into Chinese and we get the new website up and running. Now we just wait for our business to pick up. Oh wait, what was that – did I hear my email inbox chime with a new message? There it is, I’ve been waiting so long for the sales floodgates to open up. I can’t wait to see what my first customer in China wants to order.

Hmm. Uh-oh!

This message is in Chinese. I don’t know how to read Chinese, now what do I do?

The point of this is to make sure when you translate your website into another language, expect that the contacts that you receive (emails and phone calls) will be in that foreign language – so you need to make sure that you have the staff to understand the language you translate your website into. Otherwise, you’ve just opened your business up to the world – only to say nothing – because you don’t understand what people are saying. It seems like something that would never happen, but with translation tools becoming so prevalent and easy to use – it happens all the time.