Page 66 - Electronic Commerce

Introduction to Electronic Commerce

are not important for Web site designers (unless, of course, their sites include audio or
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video elements); however, a significant number of differences occur in word meanings and
spellings. You might be familiar with these types of differences, because they occur in the
U.S. and British dialects of English. The U.S. spelling of gray becomes grey in Great
Britain, and the meaning of bonnet changes from a type of hat in the United States to an
automobile hood in Great Britain. Chinese has two main systems of writing: simplified
Chinese, which is used in the Peoples Republic of China, and traditional Chinese, which is
used in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Most companies that translate their Web sites choose to translate all of their pages.
However, as Web sites grow larger, companies are becoming more selective in their
translation efforts. Some sites have thousands of pages with much targeted content; the
businesses operating those sites can find the cost of translating all pages to be prohibitive.
The decision whether to translate a particular page should be made by the corporate
department responsible for each page’s content. The home page should have versions in
all supported languages, as should all first-level links to the home page. Beyond that, pages
that are devoted to marketing, product information, and establishing brand should be
given a high translation priority. Some pages, especially those devoted to local interests,
might be maintained only in the relevant language. For example, a weekly update on local
news and employment opportunities at a company’s plant in Frankfurt probably needs to
be maintained only in German.
A number of firms translate Web pages and maintain them for a fee that is usually
between 15 and 50 cents per word for translations done by skilled human translators.
Languages that are complex or that are spoken by relatively few people are generally
more expensive to translate than other languages.
Different approaches can be appropriate for translating the different types of text that
appear on an electronic commerce site. For key marketing messages, the touch of a
human translator can be essential to capture subtle meanings. For more routine
transaction-processing functions, automated software translation may be an acceptable
alternative. Software translation, also called machine translation, can reach speeds of
400,000 words per hour, so even if the translation is not perfect, businesses might find it
preferable to a human who can translate only about 500 words per hour. Many of the
companies in this field are working to develop software and databases of previously
translated material that can help human translators work more efficiently and accurately.
The translation services and software manufacturers that work with electronic
commerce sites do not generally use the term “translation” to describe what they do.
They prefer the term localization, which means a translation that considers multiple
elements of the local environment, such as business and cultural practices, in addition to
local dialect variations in the language. The cultural element is very important because it
can affect—and sometimes completely change—the user’s interpretation of text.

Cultural Issues
An important element of business trust is anticipating how the other party to a
transaction will act in specific circumstances. A company’s brand conveys expectations
about how the company will behave; therefore, companies with established brands can

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