RE: Business Case for i18n?

Cornee

One assumes so. But I assumed that the question is one of conducting
business multilingually, not simply randomly adding languages to a
website.

For some types of business I would assume that it's relatively
simple. I'm thinking here of something like an online music company
selling CDs. The format required for the product itself is standard.
It can be distributed by post. All that remains is the difficulty of
dealing with online transactions in a variety of currencies, and
possibly variable postage costs. There must be a fair number of
businesses in that sort of position. It all depends entirely on the
product.

In our case we were already operating multi-nationally before we set
the web site up. This also must be true of a number of companies. In
fact the web and the Internet look set to significantly reduce what
it costs us to work multilingually.

There is also the question of languages not mapping to national
boundaries. As far as I can tell from our site statistics a
significant percentage of the users of both our Spanish and Chinese
web sites are connecting from US based ISPs.

I'm based in London. To produce information in their first language
for 90% or more of London's population you need to be working in
quite a number of languages. This must be true of many if not most
major cities. It's good marketing to be seen to have made an effort
to make things easy for the customer. In the case of building
multilingual web sites it's not a lot of effort for potentially a
very substantial effect.

--
Eric Jarvis
Assistant Manager, BI Online
Tel: ++44- (0) 20- 8541 4949
website: www.befrienders.org


-----Original Message-----
From: Cornee van der Linden [mailto:vdlinden25@hotmail.com]
Sent: 14 June 2001 14:34
To: webmaster@befrienders.org; www-international@w3.org
Subject: RE: Re[2]: Business Case for i18n?

Hello Eric,

I think that adding more languages does not always result in more
business
for each website. It depends on the type of business you're in. If
you are
an informational site, it certainly will increase the amount of
visitors. If
you try to sell something through your website, just adding
languages won't
do it. In order to get more business, you would also have to offer
local
payment options, local products, local distribution, etc, etc.

Regards,

Cornee van der Linden
Global Logistics Technologies

Received on Thursday, 14 June 2001 10:32:01 UTC