Localizing a localizer’s website: the challenge

We in the localization community have some serious housecleaning to do. As some of you might have heard during my presentation at Localization World Seattle this past October, we are not practicing what we are preaching in terms of properly localizing our websites. By and large, website localization is something we get more right for our clients than for ourselves. The conclusions drawn about our industry in a new research study that I commissioned with Nitish Singh at St. Louis University are intentionally provocative.

By revealing our own Achilles’ heel through this study, my aim is not only to drive change within my own organization, namely executing a plan to update our website over the course of this year, but also to open up a dialogue within the localization community. I believe that we share common pain points and could all stand to improve our e-business practices to, in turn, help build global brands. If we want to have a voice at a more senior level within our clients’ organizations, then we have to lend more credibility to the principles of our industry by taking them more seriously ourselves.

Roots of the research study

In a way, I stumbled into this provocation. The process started more innocently during the fall of 2006 when I engaged Singh to survey the attitudes of 60 multinational executives vis-à-vis localization. My view was that too many of these executives were tending to make decisions about website localization on a more tactical level, where time and budgets tend to easily get squeezed, and not enough on a strategic level — specifically, as an integral part of their strategic communications plans in the countries or regions where they do business. The survey was issued in January 2007 and completed by April.

The results of the survey proved my hunch to be valid: 88% of the executives surveyed stated localization is a key issue, and 76% of them said that localization is important specifically for international customer satisfaction. Yet over half of these respondents also admitted that they allocate only between 1% and 5% of their overall budget for localization.

Around the time we were poring over the attitudinal survey results, I had a conversation with a client at a very large Fortune 500 company who brought me in to do a presentation to senior executives about localizing their website. They basically called me on the fact that the Conversis website was not at all the best case study for what I was trying to sell them. I knew I needed to act on this internally, but I also wondered if I were alone or if it were an industry-wide problem.

With this, I set off to build on the attitudinal survey, undertaking a more comprehensive industry-wide analysis, collaborating again with Singh. From April to September 2007, we looked more deeply into the localization efforts of multinationals and also the practices of localization vendors themselves. As for our peers, we wanted to know the answer to the following question: Have other localization firms also been focused on delivering services to clients at the expense of ensuring that their own websites are based on web development standards and other elements that help tailor content for local audiences?

Some observations about the vendor community

Through this research process, we were able to pinpoint too many common quick fixes out there internally, which is half the problem. Localization firms localize their websites either because they want to attract customers from certain geographies — that is, they localize for specific countries where they want to do business — or because they want to use their own websites as a showcase for their services. Issued in the fall of 2007, our study results showed that these attempts have been largely incomplete or unsuccessful in many ways. While we further validated our observations about the lack of strategic delivery on localization efforts of multinationals, the vendor community surprisingly fell even further short by comparison. The numbers speak for themselves.

• On average, a vendor company site had about seven unique languages depicted. Multinational company websites supported on average 19 unique languages.
• We found that 30% of client (multinational) sites have a dedicated global gateway page, while only about 9% of vendor sites have a dedicated gateway page.
• Approximately 4% of vendor sites have local support pages that were equivalent to their US websites, compared to 24% by multinationals.
• Almost 92% of vendor international sites for Spain and Germany are basically standardized templates of their US sites.
• Only about 2% of vendor sites are localized or highly localized as opposed to 20% of multinational sites.

The other half of our problem as vendors is external. The World Wide Web is finally living up to its original promise of changing the way people do business, yet we are not taking full advantage of it. The internet is a sophisticated avenue for communication and e-commerce, no longer just the giant bulletin board that many are still using it as, myself included.

At Conversis, we have been receiving an increasingly higher-level quality of inquiries through our website as e-commerce and online communications have improved. In other words, our website is gradually becoming the de facto delivery channel for us, whereas five years ago, when we put a stake in the ground, it was just one of many delivery channels. Other localization vendors have gone through the same evolution. Of all this, all I can say is:

1. The age of the electronic brochure is truly dead.
2. Doing fewer things better is, well, better.
3. Making it easy for customers to come to you will pay rich dividends.

Improvements on the horizon: guiding principles

These truisms have manifested for me into guiding principles on which I am pinning our website redesign process over the next year.

1. While we were satisfied in the past to have our website serve as a static electronic brochure, it must now be an interactive tool where clients can regularly and efficiently do business with us. We intend to outfit our site with various forums, including the right mix of blogs and other social media tools.
2. In terms of the localization of our website, we must have a clear mandate and never claim to be something that we are not. We will not localize into any language that we do not have a front-to-back position in. In other words, it is pointless for us to create a version of our website in Malay since we do not plan to have anyone who speaks Malay to field those customer calls.
3. As part of an effort to very clearly define our core competencies, we must make it easy for customers and prospects to contact us in the areas where we have expertise. Our website will have a clean look and feel as well as easy navigation, no matter which localized version a user is accessing.

In the spirit of full disclosure, my company’s website has always been a very undercooked product, especially considering the resources we originally had available. By putting out all of my — or rather our — dirty linen with this study, I intend to drive some much-needed improvements in-house, and also, in tandem, I hope to engage you in some constructive dialogue in the process. For whatever reasons we in the vendor community are not properly localizing our own websites. I believe the most important thing we all need to do is to set our sights on getting it right.

Work in progress

The vendors and large companies we serve have the complicated task of delivering relevant content to specific audiences in formats that are easy to find and navigate. By the time you read the second installment in this series, I will have some progress to report, especially about the challenges I am facing as the website redesign project gets under way. Plus, I trust I will also discover and start to share best practices as of this second article. By the third article, I aim to report on the status of my re-launched website. A final post-launch article will round out this series and serve as a forum for final reflection — have I gotten my house in order?

Keep in mind that none of us is starting from scratch! If you have any comments or questions in the meantime, please drop me a line at

Gary Muddyman is managing director and CEO of Conversis, based in the United Kingdom. He previously served as director of operations for K International Plc. and spent 16 years working for HSBC Asset Finance U.K. Ltd.


Reprinted with permission of MultiLingual magazine. Copyright January/February 2008 http://www.multilingual.com