How do you begin to market to 300 million Arabic speakers worldwide? Is there such a thing as standard Arabic? The short answer is yes; the long answer is yes...and no. An understanding of Arabic's history may help raise your voice in and help define your global business strategy for this huge linguistic region.
"Never a dull moment" is a commonly-uttered phrase around here. Because we deal with a large variety of clients and industries, each translation project has its own personality, and in 2011 we ran the gamut when it came to helping some wildly different businesses connect with global audiences (and we had a lot of fun doing it, too!).
In this post, we review recent projects for four Acclaro clients — Netflix, Opus One, Breastcancer.org, and Amway, also highlighted in our Q4 2011 newsletter — and take a look at what makes each of their translation projects unique.
This January, largely due to grassroots organizing on social media platforms, U.S. internet users witnessed the demise of two proposed laws, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), and PIPA (PROTECT IP Act). These bills were both designed to expand the power of U.S. law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property...and were met with resistance by U.S. internet users from coast to coast. If, like millions of others, you celebrated the defeat of SOPA/PIPA, you may want to put a cork in that champagne. It turns out there’s a much more far reaching agreement, called ACTA. International in scope, it may affect what your business is able to do (or not do) online.
When it comes to translation on a budget, less is more, as we saw in Part One of Localization Cost Savings. The more you can reduce the word count of your content, the bigger your savings—25% fewer words, for example, will earn you a no-nonsense 25% translation discount.
So let’s say you’ve already taken a knife to your content; you’ve gotten rid of verbosity, eliminated text repetitions and honed in on the most essential content for your specific markets. How can you shave additional dollars off of your localization budget and finally secure that executive buy-in to move forward with your project?
Imagine: you’re in New York City for a business trip and have four hours after your last meeting to explore a city that many natives and transplants alike consider the center of the universe. You can always follow the sea of tourists to the Empire State Building, but if you’re a business traveler with a non-conformist streak, check out these five things to do in New York City after you log off your laptop.
Launching your software in new languages within global markets doesn’t have to be a “break the bank” proposition. While many companies fear that localization will meet or exceed the costs of their English release, sensible strategic preparation, a little enlightened testing, and a streamlined process can help ensure your software localization project is on time and under budget.
In this post we’ll provide an overview of the top ten tips from our Q4 2011 newsletter article to help you tackle technical translation projects affordably. Taken directly from our experience working with clients on global releases, each tip is designed to minimize headaches and maximize your localization dollar.
To celebrate Valentine's Day this year, we'll give you a slightly different gift than the flowers or card you might expect. Taking a cue from Japan, we're all about choko (chocolate) ... but who gives chocolate to whom and why might surprise you. In Japan, women give chocolate to men. Sources are unclear about why but some say it may have originated from a typo of a chocolate company executive working on an initial campaign to introduce the holiday. Ready to see what else translates when it comes to Valentine's Day in Japan?
Does “going global” bring to mind cultural and logistical hurdles? It doesn’t have to be as hard as you think. U.S. companies ready to make the leap into international business should consider two economic powerhouses perfectly suited for new adventures in global sales and marketing: Canada and Mexico.
As we discussed in our Q4 2011 newsletter, there are many good reasons you should place Mexico and Canada at the top of your list for strategic growth across North America, but there are also a few challenges you’ll need to consider. Compared to Asian and Middle Eastern markets, conducting international business north or south of the U.S. border can be a far easier prospect for American businesses.
In today's post, we are going to take a break from our usual hard-hitting, cutting-edge perspective on the world of translation and tell you about a very interesting resource for literary translation: the Index Translationum. UNESCO has been hard at work cataloging translated books and facts about literary translations for over 65 years, and they're all available online.
During the Super Bowl, people talk nearly as much about the three million dollar 30-second ads than they do about the actual football game itself. That's why Honda is pre-promoting and creating buzz for its new ad that will air during Super Bowl Sunday this February 5th. And the buzz now is all about the return of a slightly grey Ferris Bueller, the main character from the 1986 hit movie "Ferris Bueller's Day Off". Yep, Matthew Broderick returns as Ferris, a bon vivant with the utmost confidence, even when singing in Chinese. We ask: why sing in Chinese and not the original German from the movie, and was it dubbed?
When it comes to launching your product in
new languages, translation is only one part of the picture. Your brand lives or
dies with your international customers during runtime, and there’s only one way
to ensure you make a good impression: localization testing. If it sounds familiar, pat yourself on the back, because you have probably seen it before in our top ten tips article.
Before the press releases go out, get your translation project “outside the lab” for a little real-world, in-context experimentation. In this post, we’ll review three of the most important zones for localization QA, and give you an idea on how to get the real deal when it comes to customer perception.
FREE WEBINAR ALERT! Come one, come all to hear Acclaro Globalization Architect, Jon Ritzdorf, present “Website Translation: Conquering new Language Markets to Gain New Sales” on Tuesday, January 31, at 9 AM Pacific / 12 PM Eastern. If you are looking to expand your global reach, Jon will give you valuable tips to consider for your international web presence. Click through for more information and registration.
Exciting news for oenophiles! Luxury winery Opus One, forged from a partnership between Baron Philippe de Rothschild and Robert Mondavi, recently partnered with Acclaro to localize their retail website for customers in four countries.
When thinking about translation, we know idioms commonly used in English (like "it's raining cats and dogs" or "lame duck") are difficult to translate. But what about simpler things such as names and dates? As it turns out, they’re not so simple when it comes to software localization, as LinkedIn found out in this post on their website. With languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Russian you must understand not only new character sets, but also date ordering (month/day/year? year/day/month? day/month/year?) and even spacing — in our world, these fall under the umbrella term of "internationalization". Let’s take a proper look at proper names in translation.
At many large companies, all of the various components of a typical localization project — from organization to process to budgets and schedules — are in the hands of a project manager (or PM). This is no small task even when all the pieces fit together well...and when they don't, your typical localization PM has a lot to juggle. If you're tasked with producing localized content at your organization, Acclaro CEO Michael Kriz discusses ten best practices for project managers in an article on Content Management.com, and we've got a sampling of it right here.
In the world of translation, even fast-food gets into the act. Take, for example, the "Dark Vador" (no, that’s not a typo) burgers that are so popular right now in Quick fast-food resturants in France. As explained in this article from the Christian Science Monitor, these black-bunned burgers are being marketed in sync with the release of "Star Wars: Phantom Menace 3D". Bun aside, you may be wondering why Darth Vader’s name has changed. Well, young Jedi, it’s as much what you say as how you say it.
Did you put your plans to expand into Japan on hold when last year’s earthquake leveled confidence in its economy? If the fallout from the crisis temporarily clouded your view, now is the time to recognize that abundant business opportunities appear every day in post-earthquake Japan.
Finding where your company’s global expansion strategy fits with Japanese consumers may be your greatest source of growth in the decade ahead, as we mentioned in our Q4 newsletter post, "Opportunity in Japan's New Dawn". Trends in retail, social media, mobile advertising, and product design show tremendous promise for 2012 and beyond. Japan is a trendsetter — a pioneer in product design, mobile technology, architecture — and sets the bar for buyer desire globally.
We know...we're pretty awesome. We hear it all the time [blush]. You can give us anything for translation: software, websites, documentation, audio, video, any language and most any file format, and we'll transform it into exotic gibberish that you might not understand (but your global customers will!). But our full spectrum of services go beyond translation. Sharpen your pencils and open your notebooks, because you're about to get a lesson in Localization Agency Services 101.
Pop quiz: With a brand new year around the corner, where can you position your company to touch one billion consumers throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East? Which language should you speak to market your business to the fourth largest population in the world? Which economies may one day rival Brazil and China for spending power? If you don’t know, now’s a good time for a crash course on the global expansion opportunities in Turkey and Indonesia. Istanbul and Jakarta may be almost 6,000 miles apart, but they share global appeal in terms of new international business.
Flash Player will soon undergo a radical transformation for mobile apps, according to an article in Gizmodo. As the driving force behind video-dominant social media sites like YouTube, Flash was once the stalwart, must-code application for interactive media, but will soon morph into Adobe’s newest project: AIR, which will take full advantage of the rich media functions of HTML5. Acclaro’s Globalization Consultant, Jon Ritzdorf, explains what this could mean for the world of mobile app localization.
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