"That is totally me sausage" What's Holding Back Multilingual Business?

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It's hard to avoid the tired old metaphors of "explosion" and "flood" when speaking of the exponential expansion of internet and other digital content. Consider this startling factoid: According to Google's recent Think Quarterly on innovation, "In 2003, five exabytes of information existed. Now we generate that every two days."

Three key factors drive the spike in inquiries Forrester has seen this year about translation technologies, practices, and service providers. The first is this inundation of content. Even if only a tiny percentage of it could be valuable in other languages, it overwhelms the capacity of human translators.

Second, the strongest growth in consumerism and purchasing power is happening in countries with young populations and expanding economies, such as the so-called BRICs and CIVETs. (That's Brazil, Russia, India, and China plus the more obscure Columbia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, and Turkey.) Maintaining a consumer-oriented web presence in a single language today is akin to selling only to left-handed customers.

(And it's futile anyway. Site visitors can use services like Google Translate to render your site in dozens of available languages, without your knowledge or any control over the quality of the translations.)

Finally, even if you ignore the consumer opportunities - and many companies still do - there's the challenge of multilingual employee collaboration. Due to an overemphasis on the technology, many global enterprises seem surprised to learn that their slick new collaboration platform doesn't do much to help the French collaborate with the Koreans or the Saudis if there is no common language.

Read moreCategories:

• machine translation
• multilingual content management

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