InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
October 4, 1999
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How products and services help sites expand worldwide
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n 1998, when Doug Irwin looked for tools to translate GE TradeWeb--a forms-based, entry-level electronic data interchange service that lets small businesses electronically exchange business documents with larger trading partners--into multiple languages, he had little success. "Nobody knew what globalization meant," says the lead engineer at General Electric Co.'s General Electric Information Services division in Gaithersburg, Md. "There are a lot more vendors in the market now."Many companies are looking to duplicate the success of the E-business efforts in the United States in other countries, but they're finding that it isn't as easy as it might seem. Companies can't create a single Web site and expect to reach customers and distributors around the world, according to industry analysts. "Global E-commerce doesn't exist," says Martha Bennett, VP of research for Giga Information Group. "The moment you have to deliver physical goods, you're up against every piece of legislation that exists in the real world." Not to mention every cultural and language barrier.
Companies that attempt to reach other markets via the Web run into a host of issues. Chief among them are organizational problems, according to a survey by Forrester Research of 50 companies creating a global Web presence. These include managing different marketing strategies in different markets, securing adequate resources, and managing channel conflicts. Other difficulties include managing content, technical obstacles, and cultural and legal barriers. "The manner in which companies handle these is critical," says Michael Putnam, an analyst at Forrester.
In the last year, several companies have introduced products and services aimed at helping companies globalize their E-business sites. Vendors such as Global Sight, Idiom Technologies, International Communications, Uniscape.com, and WorldPoint provide tools that help create multilingual versions of Web sites. Forrester expects the market for such tools to grow at a rate of 50% a year.
Companies that host Web sites, such as Digital Island, Exodus Communications, and an increasing number of Internet service providers and telecommunications companies, including Frontier GlobalCenter and Qwest Communications, have introduced services for surmounting global network performance problems. "The demand is so great," says Joseph Baylock, VP and director of research at Dataquest, that "most of the big ISPs are heading to this market as fast as they can."
Human Touch
Translation is a key part of tailoring an E-business site for a particular market. A number of software translation products are available, but they're limited because they don't handle idioms or technical material well. So General Electric Information Services and others are turning to tools that simplify the workflow involved in using human-translation services to localize content for different markets.
General Electric looked at several products but chose Global Sight Ambassador from Global Sight Corp. to translate GE TradeWeb into French and German (and soon Italian) because the company had experience and a solid methodology. "We found there were a lot of vendors willing to let us pay for their research efforts to learn how to provide this capability, but we didn't have that kind of time," Irwin says. "We needed someone who had the capability to sell us a tool or service, implement it, and move forward."
These localized versions of General Electric Information Services' site also handle local currencies, contracts, and customer support. The goal of the $1 million project was to crack the European market and meet the demands of large global customers, such as DaimlerChrysler, that wanted to use GE TradeWeb with smaller trading partners in Europe and elsewhere.
Time Saver
Ambassador saves time and cuts production costs by providing one template of code that can be used for multiple languages. By running an Extraction Utility on the source-language Web site, the software separates HTML code from the content, creating a multilingual database and a single repository of code. Content developers and translators don't need HTML expertise. Once they complete the translation-approval cycle, the software automatically generates multilingual Web pages, eliminating the need to cut and paste content onto HTML pages. It also provides a workflow system so that General Electric Information Services can define stages for routing multilingual content throughout its global organization. This has proven critical for TradeWeb, which has an engineering team in Brentwood, Tenn., a business development and marketing group in Gaithersburg, Md., translators and a product manager in the United Kingdom, and reviewers in each country.
Ambassador is a Unix application that runs on Sun Solaris servers, using databases from either Oracle or Sybase. It takes five to seven weeks to translate and deploy each language.
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