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Most people prefer buying products and services that are presented in their own language. According to Common Sense Advisory, more than half (52.4%) of the participants in one of their research groups stated they buy only at websites where the information is presented in their language and more than 60 percent of consumers in France and Japan told Common Sense they buy only from such sites. When they factored in language competence, they found that people with no or low English skills were six times more likely not to buy from Anglophone sites than their countrymen who were proficient in English.
Click here to read the research paper about this very topic.
In addition to websites, more and more clients need localization and translation of apps for smartphones, iPads and other devices. In fact, one of our latest projects involved translation and localization of both a website and an iPhone app. The client: Georgia Institute of Technology (GA Tech), located in Atlanta, GA.
Georgia Tech reached out to us after recognizing a need to translate their Admission website for undergraduate students into Spanish and Chinese. In 2012, 14 percent of the incoming freshman population was from outside of the U.S. Of these, more than 30 percent were Asian and nearly 8 percent Hispanic.
Georgia Tech was looking for a vendor to partner with their Web-Host to receive data directly from the Web-Content Management System and return it there. This is a ‘round-trip’ we often provide for our clients. For Georgia Tech, we managed the technical implementation and translation into both languages for the website and the iPhone app as shown below.
In addition, because we wanted our client to have high quality translation, we transcreated content where appropriate, which means we added comments or explanations for a better understanding by the reader. Georgia Tech was happy with the result – and so are we.
“This is so cool and awesome! The Chinese pages look great! They not only have the original translation but also added some explanation to certain statements, which is extremely helpful!,” said the Director of Communications at Georgia Tech.
