What comes to mind when you think of Hong Kong? Glittering skyscrapers, rumbling trams, Buddhist temples, museums, parks, street markets, and dim sum…not to mention gorgeous Victoria Harbour, for starters. Perhaps even Disneyland. When Christmas rolls around, though, a traditional holiday spirit pervades the air, and you will also see Santas and Christmas trees in abundance as Hong Kong puts on its holiday finery.
If you're like us, you much prefer shopping on your favorite store's website at home in your bunny slippers (don't judge) than fighting the crowds at the mall. And you're not alone...Cyber Monday resulted in $1.25 billion dollars in online sales in the U.S. alone, according to an article on ITProPortal. While Cyber Monday is traditionally a follow-up to the post-Thanksgiving "Black Friday" event in the U.S., global ecommerce is following suit.
For Americans, Mexico may seem like that oh too-familiar country next door — the land of tacos, tequila, mariachis and salsa — yet our closest neighbor to the south has more mystique than the average outsider realizes. If you're looking to do business with Mexico, it's in your interest to dig a bit deeper and gain an understanding of authentic Mexican culture; after all, you'll need a few talking points for that local networking event or business meal.
As a business professional with an eye on emerging economies, you are probably familiar with Mexico's basic profile. You probably already know, for example, that Mexico is home to the highest number of Spanish speakers in the world; La ciudad de México (a.k.a. Mexico City) tops the population charts for cities with nearly 20 million inhabitants. Those of you who read the The Wall Street Journal or The Financial Times consider common knowledge that Mexico is part of the super-quartet of emerging economies called MIST. And the gastronomical geeks among you have no doubt read that our most cherished food north of the border, chocolate, originated in Mexico.
But here are seven Mexican fun facts that even the savvy international business professional may not know:
The best thing about our Go Global Holiday Card Creator is that you (yes, you!) get to send free e-cards with holiday greetings to friends, family, business associates and/or parole officers around the world, in any one of twelve languages. From a secretary in Shanghai to an uncle in Umbria, put a smile on someone’s face in a different time zone.
The end of the year is a traditional time for gift-giving in many parts of the world...but often for very different reasons. In Japan, early December marks one of the two main gift-giving seasons, called oseibo (the other main gifting season is called ochugen and happens in the summertime). During oseibo, friends, family, and especially business associates may exchange lavish gifts like cantaloupe — melons and many fruits common in other parts of the world are a rare treat in Japan — that can fetch prices of up to $100 in Japanese department stores. Guest author Rochelle Kopp explains the custom of and etiquette behind oseibo.
We have three easy steps to breaking into the rapidly growing Chinese online marketplace:
Step 1. Read our newsletter article on preparing your social media launch
Step 2. Check out this article from Fast Company to get your statistics need-to-know cultural considerations, and
Step 3. Continue reading this blog post (click "Read Full Post" below) to find out how these elements interact.
Ever wonder how the subtitling and dubbing process actually works? It is a far cry from the sometimes badly-produced televised kung fu movies from the 80s and 90s that you may remember. As mentioned in our recent blog post on the art of subtitle translation, there's more to this than meets the eye.
Alessia Petrucci, Acclaro's Translation Director, oversees translation and language related processes as well as vendor recruitment. Originally from Tuscany, Alessia has a degree in Translation from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and has worked in the translation department at Microsoft and J.D. Edwards before joining Acclaro. Antonella Masters, Project Coordinator for Acclaro's San Francisco office, is a Roman native and has worked for Chevron and BASF in Italy, as well as for the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Scuola in San Francisco.
Cocomero and anguria both mean watermelon in Italian, except Romans will be more familiar with the former term and most everyone else will know the latter. While this may seem odd, "modern" Italian is actually relatively new. Prior to the unification of the country 150 years ago, centuries of division and foreign rule (Austrian, Spanish and French) have meant both cultural and linguistic diversity, as evidenced in the development of the multiple dialects used all along the Italian Peninsula.
A localized mobile application is a great way to reach your global customers. However, it's not always as simple a process as making sure your app's language matches that of your user's mobile device or smartphone. There are some things to think about on the development side, which we've neatly summed up in our full newsletter article from earlier this year.
The meeting's over. You've got a little time to explore. It's your chance to get out of that hotel room, get off the beaten path, and experience the culture, the flavor, and the people. Madrid is Spain’s largest and liveliest city — its streets are often as crowded and active at 2 a.m. on a Saturday as at 5 p.m. on a weekday. Madrileños, as its denizens are known, are ready to live life to the fullest, and if you’re visiting this greenest of all European cities (more trees and parks than any other), you should be too!
If you work with a content management system (CMS), such as Drupal, Sharepoint, Joomla, or Wordpress, and are considering localizing the website that lives inside of it, you may wonder how well it will play with your languages. Or, if you're trying to find the right CMS that supports the localization process, you'll need to ask a few questions, such as: Will the text display correctly? Will the CMS be able to keep language content separate? Not all CMSs handle things the same way, so it's best to figure out the answers before you start the localization process and/or before move to a new CMS. Read a quick review of the basic questions you need to ask, or read our full article on how to choose the best CMS for your localization needs.
Translation isn't as easy as you'd think. It's not a matter of simply replacing words or letters in one language with those of another. Learning all the words in a foreign language dictionary, for example, may give you a great vocabulary, but that is a far cry from understanding how that language operates. If you take translation too lightly, as we mentioned in our earlier post on marketing missteps, the results can be less than ideal for your business. They can also be quite funny, which is what David Henry Hwang's play Chinglish is all about.
Modern business looks to emerging economies—areas noted for rapid growth and industrialization, according to Wikipedia—as targets for investment. One of the most commonly cited areas, BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China—read more about this in our blog post), now has some competition from MIST (Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, and Turkey). An article from AdAge provides some compelling reasons for why MIST may be a viable and profitable market for your product or services.
Russian, ostensibly full of complicated grammar and vocabulary that can seem unfamiliar to other languages, has gotten a bad rap as far as learning languages goes. With the right techniques, though, it's not as bad as it seems. A little working knowledge of Russian can go a long way, as it is either the primary or secondary language of some 300 million people, according to Wikipedia, a large majority of which are located in growing global economic centers. Susanna Zaraysky demystifies the process and provides some great techniques to get you started. Next stop: Novosibirsk!
If you have an English website, you know that banner ads bring customers to your site. If you want to reach out to global audiences by localizing your website, localizing your banner ads will help drive traffic to your site, as they do in English. Localizing banner ads isn't always as straightforward as you might think. You may have to customize your banner ad campaign based on regional or geographical preferences, or re-create content that you don't have in English. We'll explain how to set up your global banner ad campaign for success.
About guest author Susanna Zaraysky: Susanna is a speaker of seven languages and author of Language Is Music (El idioma es música, in Spanish), a short and easy-to-read book on how to learn foreign languages using music and the media. Find Susanna on her website or follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Picasa, and on YouTube.
Brazilian Portuguese has a mellifluous (sweet sounding) sound to it. It flows like honey. If you are going to Brazil for business and you want Brazilian reais to move your way, like bees to honey, then you need your Portuguese to be sweet, smooth and melodic. The closer you sound to native, the easier it is for people to understand you and accept you. In all my travels, and I’ve been to over 50 countries, I saw that the better my accent was, the friendlier and more accepting locals were of me. People like to be around others who sound like them. Here are some helpful hints to get there:
Liesbeth Matthieu of NetApp and Emma Young of Acclaro presented at Localization
World Santa Clara on October 10, 2011, offering more specifics around the
in-country linguistic review structure highlighted in our blog post “NetApp Achieves Gobal SimShip with High-Quality
In-Country Review.” The following are five tips from their presentation
that will help your business create an effective in-country review program:
If you’re thinking about testing—or even diving into—the waters of the rapidly growing Chinese social media market, now is the time to start doing your research. With more than 400 million Internet users, most of them young, educated, and savvy about games and web socializing, there’s ample opportunity for well-prepared businesses to succeed.
We’ve got a few ideas to help you get familiar with Chinese online channels as you start out, and expand into this lucrative market in a way that’s culturally appropriate. More detail can be found in our full newsletter article.
The meeting's over. You've got a little time to explore. It's your chance to get out of that hotel room, get off the beaten path, and experience the culture, the flavor, and the people.
The crescent-, or may we say, croissant-shaped island of Montreal is located just a few kilometers north of the U.S. border and just about on the same longitude as New York City. With the majestic St. Lawrence River rolling along its lower banks, and the Laurentian Mountains a few hours to the north, it is an urban jewel in an equally beautiful natural setting.
What does 2012 rhyme with? Opportunity. Specifically, opportunity
for you to:
There’s more good news; you don’t have to go it alone. At Acclaro, we specialize in the very services you need to reach these objectives: website localization and globalization.
A few fun facts for you:
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