Globalization Trends

Working 9-5 you tend to focus on individual tasks ignoring the generalities that exist within your field. Listening to John Yunker discuss web globalization trends in a recent webinar was a good reminder of what is occurring in the localization industry every day. Here are a few developments taking place within web globalization to improve business worldwide.

Consistency among a company’s global websites is key. Standardizing logo placement, color scheme, and overall structure simplify the task of localizing a product. It also provides for brand consistency, allows for a more user friendly product, and saves money and time. This is not to say that some flexibility should not still be afforded to regional branches.

As important as consistency is for a company, a local branch’s autonomy still needs to be maintained. An image used in the US will not have the same effect on consumers in Brazil. Regional branches must be allowed some individuality in order to most effectively target their audience. Besides catering to the local market, differences among regional sites allow for content flow between branches. So, when one region utilizes effective content, they are able to pass that information on to other regions that in turn can manipulate that content to work for their locale. Flowing content keeps translators and bilingual writers and marketers in high demand.

New trends are starting to pop up in web globalization. Free web translations, such as Babel Fish (which I have to admit I used to finish some college papers in Spanish class) and Google Translate have made it easier for people to access websites. While these products cannot compare to actual human translation, they have been tweaked enough to no longer be called crude. In fact, these sites even have the option of translating entire web pages, allowing any user to view any web page. Localized URLs, in practice called Internationalized Domain Names, or IDNs for short, are beginning to take precedent in web globalization. IDNs provide new opportunities and benefits to non-English speaking web users allowing domain names to be established in their own native tongues. It would no longer be necessary to start at an English site and navigate through until finding the Russian counterpart. For more information check out the article on Internationalized Domain Names.

As globalization progresses, further continuities will emerge and those that exist will be perfected. Already, as new companies pop up, engineers are designing new media products that can be easily localized. Increasing refinement throughout the localization industry will only become more refined by corporate awareness of globalization necessity.