The world is your oyster
It’s time for us to get back on our favourite hobbyhorse here at Applied Language Solutions after reading an interesting piece on the BBC’s website this morning .
Small firms are missing out on exports…well, what do you know?
Rather than go down the “how many times do we have to say it” route, it’s far better for us to welcome this coverage on the export issue, which raises awareness of the opportunity that overseas sales presents; not only to UK companies but to the country and the economy as a whole.
The article focuses on a campaign driven by UKTI to highlight the benefits of exporting and overcome the perceived barriers such as resources, financing and understanding the culture. The subject of language as a barrier is briefly touched upon in the pamphlet promoted within the article, which refers readers to free online translation tools such as Google Translate. However it isn’t always enough to use a tool like this as there is more than just local documentation translation to consider when targeting overseas markets. Pure machine translation can also ruffle a few cultural feathers along the way if the translations are too literal. Nothing worse than accidentally causing offence when trying to establish yourself in a new market so best to use it for certain types of content.
Translating a website is the ideal starting point to sell to other countries. With customers four times more likely to buy from a site in their own language it makes perfect sense and you don’t necessarily need a sales force on the ground if you can sell online. Before assuming this will be a huge, labour intensive and costly task bear in mind that you don’t actually have to translate the whole site. Some targeted landing pages and a translated FAQ section might be all you need to get started. Multilingual SEO can also help in terms of ensuring the right people, in the right markets get to the right pages on your site. So getting the keywords, the meta data and any Pay Per Click adverts localized properly is critical.
To tackle the existing trade deficit we need to get more companies exporting and, despite our efforts through our Export Box initiative to date and regular rants on this blog, there are still too many companies out there believing that it simply isn’t an option for them.
We need more articles like this, more support and guidance from Government and a greater understanding of how easy it is to get started.
Ok, so we have been saying it since 2009. Who knows, maybe more voices singing from the same hymn sheet is what we need to really get that mindset shift to happen once and for all.
Fingers crossed.