Internet sites and portals are crossing borders and oceans to reach wider audiences as businesses become more global. Although the huge U.S. brands such as America Online and Yahoo continue to rank high in hits by non-U.S. users, they find that users increasingly want access to local content in a local language, with idioms and cultural nuances that just can't be exported.

Technology can only go so far in helping to localize Web sites for individual markets, and companies such as Etranslate, which offers Web-site translation services, and Delirium.com, which helps Asian companies get onto the Internet, must rely heavily on humans to provide that local touch.

"It's expensive to go local," said Joseph Ngai, CEO of Delirium, speaking at the International Network TIN2000 conference today in New York. Ready-made technology to help make Internet content more relevant to national or local users is lacking, he said.

Delirium spent most of 1999 building technology that lets customized local content and language be placed on standardized platform servers and databases using Oracle software. Local companies can "reskin" the platform to put their own content and language on a site. Delirium has more than 10 million pages of content, and only 50% of them are in English.

Translation from English into foreign languages and vice versa also remains a labor-intensive job for Web sites, according to Charlie Baxter, CEO of Etranslate. Machine translation may be suitable in a highly structured linguistic environment, but it doesn't work well with dynamic content, such as professional communications and casual conversation, he said.

Even the tremendous increase in computing power during the last 30 years hasn't made reliable robot translation a reality. Etranslate uses humans for much of its service, Baxter said. "Translation memory is able to recognize when you've translated something before" and is useful in providing "fuzzy matching" of words, he said. That's the state of the art today.

Here are some things to consider when making the leap to international online operations:

- The choice of names can be a minefield when going global. Take Vitaminic, a European music Web site. Germans, French, and Italians had no trouble with the name or its connection to music, said Gianluca Dettori, CEO of the company. But when Vitaminic tried to appeal to English speakers, it found "they can't say it, they can't spell it, and they think it's a health site."

- Don't design Web sites in a vacuum. Arthine Van Duyne, a Yahoo senior international producer, said market research about potential users is mandatory to avoid wasting huge amounts of money. For instance, Yahoo must know what percentage of a nation uses wireless phones before marching into the market. Many places outside the United States are far more invested in wireless than conventional Internet access, she added.

- Move fast. "We underestimated the speed with which local players are able to bring a business to market," Van Duyne said. That resulted in a local company beating Yahoo into a market while Yahoo was still developing a special product for it. "We have to move faster to find out what the audience needs."