Overseas marketing of multinational enterprises needs to overcome language and cultural barriers, therefore most multinational companies will set up multi lingual websites to promote their products and brands. The rapid development of the Internet and mobile Internet means they have become the speediest and most effective channels where customers recognize brands. The important objective of overseas marketing for these companies is for their customers to have the most intuitive understanding of the brands; hence, how to properly manage the translation and localization of the site plays a pivotal role for enterprises in the process of promoting multinational overseas marketing.

Currently, the requirements of most multinational enterprise websites’ multilingual translation concern the quality of content translation, price and delivery time, etc.; however they don’t have a complete understanding of local markets or behaviors and are therefore not able to fully unleash the effectiveness of their overseas marketing. Actually,website translation and localization is far more complex and requires a more professional approach compared with ordinary plain text translation.

This job is not just translating the content of the website:

1. From the perspective of enterprise marketing, website localization needs to take into account a number of complex factors, including brand philosophy, a comprehensive set of solutions to target the habits of the local market population andthe local culture.

2. From a technical point of view, website localization needs to consider the type of coding of the website, the website content structure, layout, image matching, color matching and other factors, in order to successfully completing website localization and to present a complete company website to target customers in the market.

3. In terms of website content translation, the translation has to be done by professional translators with experience in the enterprise sector to ensure the quality of translation.The DTP (Desk Top Publishing) and the multimedia team should ensure that the site layout, images, audio, video and other content will be displayed perfectly for the customers. At the same time, an engineering and testing team must ensure the accuracy and functionality of the coding of the site.

In order to achieve the above mentioned, an enterprise requires a professional website localization provider to provide long-term translation and localization services.

So, how do you find the right website localization service provider?

Based on research done by the US Language Services Consulting Firm (Common Sense Advisory), more than three quarters of the interviewed companies stated price was the primary element in purchasing localization services. However, price and quality are always conflicting factors, thus, multinational enterprises have to be alert not to sacrifice the quality of the services of localization purely because of a concern about the price. There is a saying: “You pay peanuts, you get monkeys”. The requirements of website localization services include professional content translation, experience in translation management processes and strong technical support; therefore reducing the cost of quality localization services is difficult.

When an enterprise chooses a localization service provider, it has to understand and assess the qualification and capability of the providers; the figures below show the necessary evaluations.

According to the above screening process, the enterprise can effectively shortlist a few localization providers that meet the business requirements. In the process of filtering, apart from considering price and quality, it should also take into account whether the provider can respond positively to the needs of the enterprise, ensure the quality of the project as well as supplying support for the services rendered, and also its skills in coordination and communication.

With 20 years experience in translation and localization, EC Innovations is both flexible and efficient and can provide customers with customized services; customers’ problems are our problems to be solved, customer centricity is EC Innovation’s core competitiveness. Website localization is not just about the site content, it also involves frequent changes to website coding, images, video, audio, composition and other factorsto successfully localize process requirements and scope. We at EC Innovations have an organization structure and process flow focusing on website localization (the team includes: professional level translation team, project management team, DTP team, Multimedia team, IT engineering team, QA team) to improve the overall quality of delivery for website localization.

Lastly, multinational enterprises should also investigate the previous project experiences of providers, their reputation in the industry, if there is a strict quality standard in the organization, if there is a specialized website localization solution. They should also seek feedback from other customers to assess whether the provider is an effective communicator that gives timely feedback based on the customer’s needs.