Selling La Vida Loca

There’s a widely reported story that when the Pope visited Mexico, an enterprising North American had thousands of souvenir T-shirts printed saying “Vi la Papa.” Unfortunately, the story goes, he meant to say “Vi el Papa.” He was left with a stock of shirts proclaiming “I saw the potato” not, as he had expected, “I saw the Pope.”

Whether that story is true or merely one of those “it should be true” stories, the T-shirt entrepreneur learned a lesson that online retailers are learning as well—the desire to offer products to a certain market in the target market’s language of choice is often harder than it appears. But usually what trips retailers up are the nuances of a language, not blatant errors like using la when you mean to use el. “Translation isn’t replicating words; it’s communicating thoughts and meanings,” says Will Fleming, president of MotionPoint Corp., a Coconut Creek, FL-based provider of translation services for web-based retailers and other businesses.

Fastest growing market

By now, the power of the U.S. Spanish-speaking market is well understood and can be summed up in one phrase: “Hispanics are the fastest growing minority in the U.S.,” says Augustin Viola, director of e-commerce for Office Depot Inc., which launched a Spanish-language retail web site last year.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Hispanics make up 14% of the U.S. population and their numbers are growing five times faster than the general population’s. In addition, the Census Bureau says, their purchasing power is growing twice as fast as the general population and will amount to more than $1 trillion by 2010, up from $450 billion in 2000. Half of the Hispanic population over age 16 has Internet access.

Many Hispanics are becoming woven into the web of American life, but even many who know English prefer to conduct certain aspects of their lives and business transactions in Spanish. Consultants Common Sense Advisory Inc. reports that 70% of Spanish speakers residing in the U.S., many of whom are comfortable in English, prefer Spanish for domestic and family activities. “Depending on the level of acculturation, a significant portion feel more comfortable with Spanish when it comes to making major purchase decisions,” Viola says.

That is a reality that a wide range of retailers have tapped into, from small sites such as GiftBaskets.com to larger sites AdvanceAutoParts.com, which launched its Spanish site in mid August, SharperImage.com, 1800Flowers.com and Office Depot, to name a few.

And so the decision for many retailers boils down not to whether but rather to how to make their sites available in Spanish. “We’re based in Miami, where there’s a huge Latin population, so we knew the market was there,” says Marc Malaga, president of GiftBaskets.com. “Our challenge was to figure out the best way to do it.”

The web presents new translation challenges. Since a web site is dynamic, the demands for translation are constant. In the pre-Internet days, translation of catalogs and advertising material was relatively easy. Once it was completed, it was static until the next edition. In addition, on top of the ever-changing content of web sites is the fact that the web is an impersonal medium that relies almost entirely on a technology-based user interface. If you don’t get the message right the first time, you can lose the customer.

When it comes to translating sites, the choices are to translate and maintain a Spanish site in-house, go outside using a hybrid machine-human translation or go outside for a human translation service. Almost no one uses a pure machine-based translation for a customer operation as important as a retail web site. Too many retailers have read about web sites—or conducted experiments at such sites—that purport to translate into other languages and end up producing hilarious mistranslations because the technology reads only the words and cannot understand context or how word order affects meaning.

Office Depot chose the in-house route, providing regular translation work to 40 to 50 outside translators who update product descriptions for the Spanish OfficeDepot.com within a few weeks of when products change on the English site. Since major updates occur only a couple times a year, the lag is acceptable, Viola says. And the peace of mind that human translators provide is worth the cost and lag, he says. “Manual translation is the only way to avoid a customer experience or p.r. disaster,” he says. Office Depot maintains and updates the web site in-house.

GiftBaskets.com chose the outside route, employing MotionPoint to translate its site and present the Spanish information to shoppers when they click on the GiftBaskets.com en Espanol button. “There was very little for us to do before and after implementing it,” Malaga recounts. “It took us under an hour to get going and we’ve had nothing to do since then.”

Client-specific glossary

MotionPoint first translates a site, using 55 human translators on staff organized by vertical markets. They consult with retailers to establish the appropriate translations for words where there are multiple options. The company establishes a client-specific glossary that will guide all future translations. For instance, Fleming recounts, a client that sold pens on its web site had, using a previous translator, three different words to describe pens. Two were words that applied to a ballpoint pen and one applied to a fountain pen—and none was correct, he says. In translating the GiftBaskets.com content, the company encountered the word “popcorn” frequently. Just about every Latin American dialect has a different word for popcorn, Fleming says. MotionPoint’s translations are reviewed by three people before they are presented to the client, Fleming says.

After the initial translation, MotionPoint translates only changes to the site. It then delivers the Spanish language site in the form of a presentation layer when a shopper clicks on the Espanol button. All that MotionPoint requires is a link to the Spanish site through the MotionPoint technology. The system does not change the retailer’s underlying database and does not require a parallel site or other IT work. “We deal only at the language layer of a web site,” Fleming says. “We have no impact on the underlying technology.”

MotionPoint’s services range in cost, in Fleming’s words, “from single-digit thousands of dollars to north of $1 million.” Maintenance and ongoing translation amount to 20-40% of the initial investment, he says. MotionPoint uses a software program that identifies repetition and automatically populates fields with repeated words for which the retailer does not pay a translation fee, the company says. Malaga wouldn’t reveal how much GiftBaskets.com paid for translation, but says, “It was less expensive than the other options. Because of their cost, the other options weren’t really options for us.”

London-based SDL International, another translation company, takes a combined human translator/automation approach in a product it calls Knowledge-based Translation System. Under that system, recently implemented by worldwide hotel franchiser Best Western International, SDL technology identifies the unique words on a web site. Humans translate those words. The company then creates a custom dictionary that is housed on a translation platform, runs the site through the translation engine and re-populates the site with the translated information.

$2 million in savings

The Knowledge-based Translation System reduced the 1.4 million words on the Best Western site to 43,000 unique words, reports Kathleen Bostick, vice president, North America of SDL. “At 20 cents a word, that’s massive savings,” she says. Ultimately, Best Western will translate 4 million words into French, Spanish, Italian and German.

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Best Western figures it will save $2 million in translation costs in the first year. “We are able to achieve high quality translations in half the time and at substantially lower cost than traditional translation processes,” says Ric Leutwyler, senior vice president, brand quality and member services.

Once the site is translated, retailers must ensure that the translated site communicates the desired image and experience. Many retailers tackle part of that problem upfront by agreeing on a glossary beforehand. Then some spot check the translation with staffers who are fluent in the target language. Others, such as GiftBaskets.com, survey shoppers to learn what they thought of the experience. And others rely on the quality assurance procedures of the translation vendor.

Viola stresses that, when it comes to Spanish translation of U.S. sites, retailers have many options in the kind of Spanish they employ and the decision as to which to use could affect the success of the site. “Look for a neutral Spanish,” advises Viola, who was born in Argentina and reared in Venezuela. “Choose carefully to maximize the number of potential customers who will understand it.”

Fleming characterizes the Spanish that MotionPoint’s translators use as non-confrontational. “This approach is important because the U.S. Spanish-speaking population is unlike any other, in that it’s composed of a diverse group of individuals from many countries and regions with many differing dialects,” he says.

Yet another consideration in translating to Spanish is that Spanish translations usually result in 20-30% more characters than the equivalent English words, Fleming says. So retailers need to make sure that the translated sites preserve the look and feel of their original sites. That was a concern at GiftBaskets.com, Malaga says, as the company didn’t want longer description boxes pushing the Compre (Buy) buttons deeper on the page.

After the Spanish site is launched, the fact that it is in Spanish will present other challenges. Marketing, for one. While there are tons of metrics on which English keywords produce results in search engine marketing campaigns, such depth of data does not exist for Spanish. Thus retailers with Spanish sites will be at an earlier stage in pay-per-click and page optimization search engine marketing than they are elsewhere in their operations.

Spanish sites will also prompt customer service calls in Spanish. “You shouldn’t be caught off guard by more calls to customer service in Spanish,” Fleming says. Retailers should also be prepared for e-mail inquiries in Spanish, although many leading brands—even those with Spanish content on their web sites—have a dismal track record in that area (see accompanying story).

Retailers who have made the conversion to Spanish say the investment has been worth it. While he won’t provide details, Viola notes the fact that OfficeDepot.com has a tab on its home page directing shoppers to the Spanish site indicates that the company likes what it has experienced a year after the launch of its Spanish language site. “Real estate on the home page is very valuable,” he says. “That’s an indication of how important this is to us.” He adds: “We’ve been very pleased with the results so far.”

kurt@verticalwebmedia.com

Ask it in Spanish, get the answer in English, if you get one

The value of the Hispanic market may be well known, but many online companies are not doing a lot to serve it, says a test of Spanish language e-mail inquiries conducted this summer by consultants Common Sense Advisory Inc.

To gauge how well the brands responded to the growing U.S. Spanish-speaking community, Common Sense researchers sent the same questions to brand sites in Spanish and in English. The results “demonstrate that many companies have yet to capitalize on these opportunities in English and seriously call into question their ability to respond to messages sent to their global gateways in Spanish or any other language,” the report concludes.

In a request for product information sent in Spanish, 46.9% got a reply—but only half the replies were in Spanish. The overall response rate to the product information request was 42.7% For a message that contained a minor complaint about the site, only 35.8% of Spanish messages even got a reply (vs. 49.4% overall), and only 51.7% of them were in Spanish.

A third message, a compliment about the site, got almost equal response rates in Spanish and English—35.4% and 35.6%, respectively—but only 44.8% of replies to the Spanish inquiry were in Spanish.

The fourth message, a question on where to buy the company’s products, got the highest response rate of any of the four messages when sent in English—50%—but only a 33.3% response when submitted in Spanish. Only 51.8% of replies to the Spanish inquiry were in Spanish.

Among the more surprising responses to the test e-mails, reports Donald A. DePalma, author of the report, was one response that said, “English, please. Thank you.” Another referred the writer, who had identified himself as being in Boston, to the company’s Mexico City office, with address and phone number. A third sent a message that said if the writer sent it again in English, maybe he’d get a response. That message itself was, of course, in English.

Even at sites that have significant content in Spanish, the responses in Spanish were dismally low. In fact of 12 brands that maintain Spanish language web sites, only two replied to all Spanish messages in Spanish—Ford Motors Corp. and worldwide financial services provider Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corp.