Some Global Web Efforts Lost in Translation

December 18, 2007

Jupiter Research reports that while nearly one-half of large Web sites use translated content to make their information more globally accessible, fewer than one-quarter of the same sites have "...engaged in localization or adapting site content to a specific language, country, or culture by taking into account nuances such as local terminology and consumers' preferences."

In its new report, International Search: Benchmarking the Global Search Marketer, Jupiter Research says that failure to localize risks misallocating globalization expenditures. Vice President, Zia Daniell Wigder, says, "Direct translations of a site are unlikely to include most commonly used search terms, resulting in a site that can be understood by a local audience but may receive little traffic if it fails to appear in search results." For more, see http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20071217005448&newsLang=en.

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Globalization Partners International, LLC. provides document, software and website internationalization, localization and translation services into over 75 languages including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian . http://www.globalizationpartners.com/