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Common Sense Advisory Blogs
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Over Ten Percent of Chinese Use the Internet
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CNNIC estimated that 137 million Chinese use the internet -- that's 10.5% of the PRC's population. While many of these users are not active online buyers, they do underscore a future market opportunity that many companies should consider. This is just one more datapoint that should get companies moving on the business and website globalization front.
English-speaking customers represent 40 or more percent of the world market for many American manufacturers, but meeting the linguistic needs of the other 60% means creating materials -- product, marketing, support, website, and other items -- in dozens of other languages. At the very least, companies targeting the top 25 economies -- for roughly 85% of the world's GDP -- must translate content into 17 languages. The price of not translating is high: Don DePalma's 1998 "Strategies for Global Sites" research showed that business buyers are 3 times more likely to buy if addressed in their own language, while our new research shows that consumers are 6 times more likely to click the buy button when information is presented in their natal tongue.
Addressing customers in their own language is just part of the global marketing and support equation. Besides many languages, global businesses must contend with the fact that the content they are translating is a moving, growing target. As measured in bytes, corporate content grows in excess of 50% a year. This increase in volume is compounded by new content requirements, such as new content types like MP3 audio files with spoken support information and new market demographics requiring simplified instructions for products such as HP's Printing Mailbox or Google Calendar. Advances such as Intel's 45-nanometer chip promise the development of sophisticated electronics in a widening variety of consumer and business devices, each destined for cross-border shipping. But will the packaging and informational materials be adapted for the target market before shrink-wrapped units get hoisted in shipboard containers?
Within the high-tech sector, Common Sense Advisory estimates that 85% of website content and 98% of product documentation and marketing materials can be leveraged globally. That means a large quantity of content must be translated each year from English into dozens of other tongues. When requirements dictate dozens of languages, the aggregate translation costs easily outstrip the original cost of content development, and all efforts must be made to minimize not only the "per word" cost of the translation itself, but more importantly the "transaction" cost of processing each chunk, page, graphic, file, and project. We recently published a report on translation management systems (TMS) that help manufacturers of global products reduce per word costs and transaction costs --- and get those adapted-for-local-market products into the ships and into the holds of those B747-8 cargo planes faster.
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