Copyright 2002 by Richard Seltzer
Originally published by Wiley. The rights have reverted to the author
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Actually, the global nature of the Internet fosters two diametrically opposite trends at the same time. Yes, geography ceases to be a barrier to commerce; and companies anywhere can serve customers everywhere. But at the same time, cultural and language differences, that made little difference when markets were fragmented geographically, become major barriers to companies that would like to sell everywhere, and major opportunities to companies that can help deal with those barriers.
Required assignment:
• go to babelfish.altavista.com and translate at least one of your
pages to the language of your choice.
Elective:
• try chat translation at Multicity
Smaller companies, without such expert help, should proceed carefully. Over-optimistic expectations of an expanding global business could either undermine the credibility of your business plans or lead you to waste precious resources at a critical time.
Frequently quoted global statistics of Internet growth are primarily based on experience in the US, which, until recently, dominated the Internet. But circumstances elsewhere can be quite different, leading to quite different outcomes.
The US has enjoyed the benefits of flat rate Internet pricing and free local phone calls. In many other countries, both Internet service and local telephone service are metered -- which can easily make Internet connectivity far too expensive for the average household.
The telecom infrastructure of a country also matters. In some countries, telephone lines are slow and unreliable, and it is virtually impossible to get a second line to your home.
On the other hand, cell phone pricing in the US usually includes air time and other metered charges; while in some other countries cell phone service is at a fixed, reasonable rate. In such countries cell phones (and services built on them) have spread rapidly, with many households having only cell phone service, and wireless Internet access might take off much faster in those countries than in the US.
Also, the word "user" may mean something very different in one part of the world than another. In some parts of the world, rental Internet access from Internet cafes is common -- where people have to wait in lines or schedule time in advance and pay high per-minute rates. People in such circumstances are very impatient with pages that are laden with ads, slow to load, and low in real content. In some countries business travel and use of laptops are common, and there's a need for services that help people keep track of files and appointments and email messages across multiple machines. In other countries, travel is restricted, laptops are rare, and people have access to just one machine and only at limited times. In the US, today, we typically have multiple computers per person, both at work and at home. But in some countries, it is common for there to be 6-8 users per computer, even in a business setting; with almost no access from home.
Keep in mind, too, that the success of your business model isn't likely to depend on the total number of Internet subscribers or users, but rather the interests, habits, and buying power of those who have subscribed. The total number of subscribers might keep increasing, but with different waves of newcomers -- like different waves of immigrants -- each using the Internet in different ways. So even if total numbers roughly tracked predictions, demand for particular products and services might shift sharply, following a different pattern. The next wave of newcomers may or may not have as much disposable income as the those who came before, and may or may not be more inclined to buy online, or to buy the same kinds of things. When sales projections based on sheer size fall apart, investor confidence falls as well.
So far, we have gone through two stages of development in the Internet
market in the US, and seem to be starting on a third.
• Stage one -- Access is primarily from businesses and universities.
A well-educated, high-tech audience dominates. English language rules.
The vast majority of users are male.
• Stage two -- Large numbers of consumers come online, accessing the
Internet largely by dialup from home. The percentage of women goes from
very few to more than half. Children arrive in large numbers. Online shopping
takes off, but the people doing the shopping have less buying power than
the average user in Stage one.
• Stage three -- We are probably just at the beginning of this stage.
Everyone who wants an Internet connection is connected. The number of new
individuals connecting slows dramatically. But households already connected
are itching to upgrade from dialup to continuous high-speed connectivity.
And Internet growth continues in terms of the number and variety of gadgets
connected, with the average person connecting to the Internet in multiple
ways (including wireless) for multiple purposes.
Other geographic areas will probably go through such stages, but not necessarily in the same order. For instance, we'd expect local language to become very important in Stage Two, with its masses of consumers. Hence it would be important to build portal sites catering to local languages everywhere, and to provide many local-language versions of the content of major sites serving a global audience. But parts of the world where women and children have lower social status and more limited roles than in the US, may not go through Stage Two at all, at least not soon. Rather they might go straight from Stage One to Stage Three, with very little growth in consumer-oriented shopping among average citizens, and relatively little need for local language, for now.
Also, the level of Internet usage that represents "saturation" -- the point at which Stage Three begins and growth continues by adding new gadgets more than by adding new people -- may vary sharply from country to country and culture to culture, maybe going as high as 80% in some areas and staying well below 50% elsewhere.
Basically, even if markets are "global" geographically, they may still be diverse, fragmented, and complex because of language, culture, economics, and telecommunications infrastructure. Proceed cautiously, with an appreciation for the differences you are likely to encounter.
But at the same time keep your eyes out for unique new opportunities. If you or your ancestors came from a different part of the world than you live in now, consider the possibility of serving a diaspora audience -- people with a common culture who happen to live scattered throughout the world. And if you happen to be familiar with two languages/two cultures, consider running an online business that acts as a bridge between them, helping companies and individuals on either side to work smoothly with one another. For instance, consider the possibility of facilitating online multi-language/multi-culture business meetings, with live translation and culturally sensitive facilitation available.
Also, don't presume that large companies will want to simply make their sites available in multiple languages. Providing foreign language versions of content is a cost -- and a major one, when you consider the need to translate every change as well as all new pages. But a local ecommerce site in the target country could be a profit center. In other words, a company like Amazon might be reluctant to take on the task of translating everything at its site to German, but might welcome an opportunity to open a business in Germany (which, in fact, it did). In other words, you should distinguish between a local language version of a Web site, and a fully operational local site. Don't expect single monolithic businesses to dominate each market niche globally. Rather, if you are located outside the US, consider the possibility of working with a global leader and creating and running a local business in partnership with them.
If the focus of your business involves the regular use of multiple languages, you will need the accuracy that only comes with hand-crafted translation. And to avoid serious blunders, you may need cultural translation/consulting as well. But if your foreign language need is intermittent, automated translation may be an acceptable solution, and a valuable free addition to your Web site. While automatic translation has problems dealing with idioms and colloquialisms, for ordinary business communication it can be remarkably helpful.
To see how automated translation works, go to MultiCity, click on "Live! Lounge", then on "All Active Chat Rooms", with the drop-down menu next to "Topic" pick a chat room, then click "Join" to enter that chat room. Once there, pick a pair of languages -- one to send in, and one to receive in. For instance, if you choose to send in French, even if you type in English, the output to the chat area appears in French. And if you choose to receive in German, everything that everyone types, regardless of the input language, appears to you in German. The speed and ease of use are amazing. The languages available are English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.
You can create your own multi-lingual chat rooms. First register. Then click on "Access my tools", and, under "my CHAT ROOMS" click on "Create a New Chat Room." It's simple and free, and it doesn't disappear when you leave the site. You can link to your chat room and include it as part of the basic offerings of your Web business. For an example of how that could work, go to The Benjamin Franklin Institute of Global Learning at www.bfranklin.edu/bfi/ and click on "TextChat" (as opposed to "Chat Room").
If you would like to have such automated translation capability right on your PC -- for dealing with all your local documents and email -- check the software offerings of Systran, at www.systransoft.com. But if your main use of translation is occasional online use, and, in particular, translation of Web pages for yourself and for visitors to your site, then you should check the free services made available by AltaVista at its Babelfish site, http://babelfish.altavista.com
The term "babelfish" derives from The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Once you put a babelfish fish in your ear, you can understand any language in the galaxy -- language is no longer a barrier.
The AltaVista Search site www.altavista.com adapted to the multi-lingual Internet environment by partnering with companies around the world to set up mirror sites, which provide local content and instructions and help in local languages and have the server located in the target country for fast response time. Currently, they have mirror sites in Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
AltaVista also lets users limit their searches to pages in particular languages using a pull-down menu on the search form (Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish). Using the language menu to pick a particular language, and performing a search in Advanced Search for *, you can see that the AltaVista index now includes over 31 million pages in German, 29 million in Japanese, 13 million in French, 12 million in Chinese, 8 million in Spanish, 6 million in Russian, 5 million in Italian, and 5 million in Korean. Yes, English still predominates, with over 367 million pages, but thousands of non-English pages are added every day -- including pages with information that could be valuable to you if you could both find it and make sense of it.
At AltaVista's Babelfish site, you can enter a URL, or type or copy-and-paste any text into the box, and you can translate from English to French, German, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese; or from any of those languages to English; also French to German, German to French, and Russian to English. Unless the server is extraordinarily busy, you get the results almost immediately. And unless the text is idiomatic or laden with slang, you are likely to get remarkably good translations.
This service uses automated translation software from Systran. Hence it has the strengths and the limitations of automated translation. Don't expect perfection. Don't expect it to understand and correct misspellings and grammar. Don't expect artistic and colloquial translations of poetry and rap lyrics. Do expect quick and useful renderings of business-related information.
You can have fun checking how it handles tricky figures of speech that would challenge a UN interpreter, or by translating from English to another language and back multiple times and watching the ever-increasing distortions of meaning. Or you can use this as an aid to help you smoothly navigate through foreign pages.
This translation service is intimately tied into the AltaVista search service, making translation part of your normal Web-navigating experience. Whenever you do a search, matches in your results list that are in any of the languages now covered come with a "translate" link. Clicking on that takes you to a page where you select the language you want to translate it to. Then clicking on "translate" again, provides you with the page itself -- with all its graphic look and feel, including all its hyperlinks -- with the text in the language of your choice. From there you can continue to explore as you normally do in the Web environment.
Search engines that are built around the syntax of any particular language lock themselves out of the rest of the world. But AltaVista understands nothing about any language. It just captures all the text it finds and treats it all equally. (Within a couple weeks of when the original AltaVista Search site went on line, the developers got email from people in Korea who had typed in queries using their Korean keyboards and had gotten good results pointing to Korean pages.)
They recently added a "world keyboard" to this service. Just click on the keyboard icon, and a virtual keyboard appears in a Java window, and you get a new, associated translation form. The keyboard has a dropdown menu of language choices: world (English characters plus a few special characters and accented letters used in other European languages), English (useful for people whose keyboard are set already in non-English languages), French (for translating French to English and French to German), German (for German to English and German to French), Spanish (for Spanish to English), Italian (for Italian to English), Portuguese (for Portuguese to English), and Russian (for Russian to English). When you select a language, the characters on the keyboard change accordingly. Then you can type in the translation box by clicking on the keys of the virtual keyboard or by hitting the equivalent keys on your real keyboard; either way the character you see in the translation box will be a character from the language you have chosen.
This innovation makes it much easier to enter foreign text for translation.
In the past, you had to have your PC's keyboard set
to enter characters from that language, or had to cut and paste into
the translation box text that already had the appropriate non-English characters,
or you had to enter English "equivalents" of foreign characters, which
sometimes led to ambiguity.
Unfortunately, the words that you type with the virtual keyboard are only for use in that search box. This is a Java application which makes it impossible to copy and paste the text from the box to anywhere else. (This is unlike the main Babel translation page, where you can copy text -- complete with accents and non-English characters from the results box to any other document on your PC.)
Also, because of performance issues, the size of the text it will translate is limited to about 800 words or two double-spaced typed pages. If a document is longer than that limit, only the beginning will be translated; then you will encounter the words "TRANSLATION ENDS HERE" and the balance of the target Web page will appear in the original language. If the balance of such a large document is important to you, you can copy-and-paste additional chunks of text from the original into the form at the Babelfish page, one piece at a time, by hand. That's awkward, but it can solve your immediate problem and prevents one person's "need" to translate an entire book from slowing performance for millions of other people with the less demanding requirements.
Also, this service only translates plain text. Words embedded in graphics remain unchanged. And words that appear in Java applets or inside frames or inside databases do not get translated when you submit a URL for translation. And if you submit for translation a URL that is behind a firewall or on the other side of a password-protected registration page, Babelfish won't be able to fetch and translate the text. But you can copy-and-paste text from any source at all -- from newsgroups or forums or chat sessions or your email or your own personal files that reside on your personal computer. Or you can simply type in whatever text you like.
First, make sure that your pages are in a format that can be translated. If much of your content is plain text, then you are in good shape. But if you are using sophisticated techniques that create pages dynamically on the fly or are using frames or the text is generated from databases or appears in Java applets, then you have locked yourself out from taking full advantage of this capability. Perhaps you should consider creating a plain text version of your pages that will be translatable (and also be indexable by search engines like AltaVista).
If your pages do have translatable text, you could use AltaVista to translate them and save the resulting pages, even large pages created by copying-and-pasting chunks, at your site; then offer visitors the choice of which language they would like to see. But in that case, you are vulnerable to the vagaries of automatic translation, and an horrendous blunder caused by the inability of the software to understand a colloquial phrase might damage your reputation among the very people you are trying to open your site to.
Also, in that case, you take on a significant maintenance burden -- having to change your translated pages every time you change the originals; and additional overhead in terms of disk space and Web site complexity.
But the underlying technology of Babelfish makes possible an interesting alternative. If you do an AltaVista search which yields a particular page in the match list and then click on the word "translate" next to that match, you arrive at the Babelfish translation page with the URL of the target page already in the form. Bookmark (Favorite) that page and click to return to it. Once again you see the URL of the target page in the form. You can also copy and paste the URL of that Babelfish page and make a link to it from any page of yours.
If you have a Web page with less than 800 words of text -- small enough so you can feel confident that Babelfish will translate the whole thing -- go to AltaVista and do a search for url: followed by the complete URL of the page of yours that you want to make available for translation. In the search results listing for that page, click on Translate. You should arrive at Babelfish with that URL already entered in the box. Copy the URL for that translation page and link to it from your original page. Add some text to that page telling visitors (perhaps in more than one language), "for a rough translation of this page, click here." Once at the Babelfish page, visitors can choose the target language they want and get the translation, created on-the-fly, at no cost and no hassle to you. A simple explanation at your site can set user expectations appropriately. You are not responsible for the quality of the translation. You are providing this link as a convenience.
If your pages are in English, this technique would open your site to visitors who read French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
These phrases (with the appropriate accent marks, all copied and pasted from Babelfish) connect with hyperlinks to the matching documents. Here is the full text of the English version of that explanation, which you're welcome to use at your own site. You could also simply link to any or all of the translation pages listed above.
On the target page, click the left mouse button in the left margin beside the starting point in the text, and drag your cursor down over a couple of paragraphs (about a third of a typed page) to select them. Then, in the toolbar, click EDIT, then COPY to save the selected text to your Clipboard.
Next, bring up the translation page. Position your cursor over the translation form. Click the right mouse button and then PASTE. The selected text should now appear in the form. Below the form, click on the down arrow to select the language pair you want (such as English to French). Then click on TRANSLATE. The translated text should appear in a second or two.
To save the translated text in a file, click and drag (as above) to select the text; and click EDIT and COPY to place the text on your Clipboard. Then open a document in your word processor and paste the text. Return to the original document and select the next piece of text. Return to the translation page, click NEW TRANSLATION, paste the text in the new form, and proceed as before. Keep doing this as many times as necessary to translate and save the entire text.
The results should be useful, but they'll be far from perfect. (If you're reading this text in a language other than English, you can judge for yourself how good or bad it is.)"
If you encounter a Web page in an Asian language that you don't recognize, copy the URL into the Babelfish translation page and guess Korean, Japanese, or Chinese. Keep guessing until the translation works.
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