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12.2 A Strategy for Global E-Commerce 389

the description in their native language, and 56.2% agreed native language (as of 2013, the software is available in 66
that price is not as important as being able to access infor- languages). Telus can offer multilingual support at a lower
mation in their native language. In order to reach 80% of cost because they do not have to hire additional agents for
the world’s population, a website would have to be trans- each language. (See Bach 2013 for details.)
lated into 83 of the world’s 6912 languages. Therefore, a The Droid Translator app, launched in June 2014, offers
website offered in only one language can only reach the capabilities to transform personal and business chat by
20–30% of the total online population at the most. We translating phone, video, and text chat in 29 languages (see
assume the situation is similar today. Petroff 2014). The company was acquired by Yappan Corp.
Clearly, these single language websites are severely limit- in August 2015.
ing their customer base. It is not surprising then, that language
translation is one of the most obvious and most important Legal Issues
aspects of creating and maintaining global websites. In 2014,
Byte Level Research reviewed 150 corporate global websites, One of the most contentious areas of global EC is the resolu-
identifying the 25 top “amazing global gateways”—leaders, tion of international legal issues. An ambitious effort to
laggards, and best practice companies (bytelevel.com/report reduce differences in international law governing EC is the
card2014/#25top). United Nations Commission on International Trade Law
The number one global website in 2016 is Facebook. (UNCITRAL) Model Law on Electronic Commerce. Its pur-
Other large global sites are Alibaba and Google. Facebook’s pose is to provide national legislators with a set of guidelines
representative innovations include multilingual plug-ins, an that are internationally acceptable, which specify how to
improved global gateway, and multilingual user profiles. The overcome some of the legal constraints in the development
primary problems with language translation are speed and of e-commerce. It also provides for a safer legal platform to
cost. It may take a human translator a week to translate a be constructed through the design of fair, current, and consis-
medium-sized website into another language. For large sites, tent guidelines in e-commerce transactions (see uncitral.
the cost can be more than $500,000, depending on the com- org). The Model Law has been adopted in some form or
plexity of the site and the number of languages for transla- another in many countries and legal jurisdictions, including
tion and can be a lengthy process. Singapore, Australia, Canada, Haiti, and the United States.

Machine Translation Geographic Issues and Localization
Some companies address the cost and time problems by
translating their Web pages into different languages through Barriers posed by geography differ based on the transporta-
what is called machine translations such as Google Translator. tion and communication infrastructures between and within
A list of free translation programs can be found at xmarks. countries and the type of product or service being delivered.
com/site/www.humanitas-international.org/ newstran/ For example, geographic distance is almost irrelevant with
more-translators.htm and websites.translations.com. For online software sales.
examples on how Lionbridge Technologies, Inc. uses machine
translation to help their clients, see lionbridge.com/clients. Example: Clarins Group
For example, in November 2013, Lionbridge was selected by Clarins Group (clarinsusa.com), a major player in the skin
Net-A-Porter (Case 1.1, Chapter 1) to develop and maintain care, makeup, and fragrance business sector, is significantly
translated content for Net-A-Porter’s global websites. Net-A- increasing its global online presence and its e-commerce ana-
Porter ships its luxury fashion products to 170 countries and lytics to optimize online performance of its trading platform.
operates several non-English sites (e.g., Mandarin, French, Its brands, such as Clarins, and Azzaro, are advertised and sold
German). For real-time translation of conversations via on websites using the EC vendor Intelligent Trader, in more
Skype, see Skype (2015). than 15 countries, while the challenges of multichannel, mul-
Lionbridge Technologies integrates its machine transla- tilanguage, and multicurrency are addressed.
tion with Zendesk Customer Service platform to deliver real-
time multilingual online support (see Company News 2015). Web Localization
Many companies use different names, colors, sizes, and
Example: Ortsbo, Inc. packaging for their overseas products and services. This
The company that enables real-time global communication practice is referred to as localization. In order to maximize
claims more than 212 million unique users in over 170 coun- the benefits of global e-commerce, the localization approach
tries. Telus International teamed up with Ortsbo in a cus- also should be used in the design and operation of the sup-
tomer care program to enable Telus’s customer service porting information systems. For example, many websites
agents to chat in real-time online to almost anyone in their offer different language or currency options, as well as