Conducting a Multilingual Market Research

The world has evolved over the years and with each passing year we have been blessed with tools which are making our lives that little bit easier. When the future was talked about in the 80’s and the 90’s flying cars was often envisaged by the sheer mention of the 2010 and beyond.

Although we do not have our cars floating in the air just yet the world has evolved a lot over the last few years – and all for the better I would say. The world is a lot more educated than it ever has been and the biggest influence of this trend is down to the Internet.

The Internet is the speedway for information and data is always passing through it to all corners of the globe we live in. Tim May has been quoted as saying “National borders aren’t even speed bumps on the information superhighway.” The world is connected by the Internet which has made tools like the fax machine absolutely obsolete. The speed in which people converse with one another is at an instant and with the odd censorship’s administered by various governments the Internet still is the bedrock for people to have their individual voices aired.

The Emergence of the Internet
Businesses have traditionally run by being reliant on a customer base that is within reach in terms of geographical locality. Brick and mortar businesses have always been setting up shop near the presence of customers or where there is a hub of activity, i.e. shopping centres or markets.

When the internet was introduced in the 90’s it was at first only consumed by the education institutions and the large business corporation. However, as hardware prices got lower at the close of the 90’s and the cost of an internet connection being more affordable the consumption of the Internet rapidly increased.

The Internet was further enhanced as a result of the evolution of businesses. When more and more businesses had success on the Internet it led to social networking sites being setup which formed as the catalyst for more people becoming aware of the Internet and having a desire to have an Internet connection simply just to use these online services, for example MySpace.

Now that they were on Facebook and had an internet connection they began to use the Internet for other things as well which included shopping online.

Using the Internet for International Growth
The lure of the internet is too much for anyone to ignore and is generally the ideal way for small businesses or start-up businesses to get a foothold in more countries than just the country they reside in.

However before beginning to trade all over the world the starting point should be to conduct market research. Expensive, I hear you say. Well market research in foreign countries does not actually mean you have to spend millions with an international marketing company who does the research for you.

First of all create a list of 15 keywords which best describe your product so people in your country can find your website in UK. A simple spread sheet will serve well in this instance which you can use to note all the various sections of your marketing strategy.

Once you have the keywords then make a list of all the countries you think your product can be popular in. Now is the time to go into the next step of the research, by using a language translator tool like Google Translate. The tool can be used to translate all the keywords into the language of the first country you are going to look in.

After all the keywords are translated then it is the stage to use the Google Keyword tool. The Google Keyword tool can be used to evaluate, by selecting the specific country and the language which will give a search volume indication as to how many people in that country are typing in terms which are related to your product. Make a note of these numbers and then type them in the respective Google search engines specific to the countries. This will help a user to evaluate the competition and the amount of opportunity there is for a specific product.

Repeat this process for as many countries as possible and you will generally get an idea of which country is best to invest in to market a certain product. Market research can quickly be done but you can further cement your opinions by contacting the locals in those countries but the Internet will always be the most cost effective way to conduct business, especially as the boundaries are squashed as low as they currently are.

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Author: Rehan keenly
Source: translationblog.co.uk

What is the most difficult language to learn - and why?

There are numerous rankings of “difficult” (and “easy”) languages to learn (note that we are talking about second-language learning here, not acquiring one’s native tongue). Some such rankings are unofficial, like the Accreditedonlinecolleges.com ranking or the ranking at MyLanguages.org; others are official, for example the classification by DLI based on the number of hours needed to achieve a certain level.

The top spot in all these ranking is given to Chinese: Accreditedonlinecolleges.com lists Mandarin and Cantonese separately, as #1 and #2; MyLanguages.org lists Chinese at the top spot and the DLI classification includes un-specified “Chinese” in the most difficult group IV, together with Arabic, Japanese and Korean. But what are the main perceived difficulties in learning Chinese (whether Mandarin, Cantonese or another Chinese variety)? In addition to the general themes of an unfamiliar writing system and dialectal variation (expected of a language with about a billion speakers, like Mandarin, or even “smaller” Chinese languages: Cantonese with 52 million speakers; Shanghainese with over 77 million speakers; Taiwanese with over 25 million speakers), Chinese is difficult to learn because of the “exotic” sounds it has and especially its tone system. There are four tones in Mandarin and six tones in Cantonese.

What about learning other East Asian languages, like Japanese or Korean? These too are typically listed at the top of the difficulty ranking. Among the most difficult aspects of Japanese (in addition to its three-part writing system, including kanji, hiragana and katakana) are “an agglutinative vocabulary” and “rigid hierarchical structure of honorifics inextricably tied to Japanese society and culture”. I agree that the rich system of honorifics — markers of esteem or respect when used in addressing or referring to a person — can be difficult to learn because of the cultural knowledge that one needs in order to be able to use these grammatical forms correctly. You will run into this difficulty if you attempt to learn Japanese, Korean or Thai.

But I am not quite sure what the problem is supposed to be about the “agglutinative vocabulary”. In fact, the term “agglutinative” typically refers not to vocabulary but to the morphological system of a language. In an agglutinative language, each affix attached to the root typically expresses one grammatical property, such as gender, number or case, but not all three at once (as would be the case in a fusional language; see below). Multiple affixes can be attached to the root, and when it happens, affixes do not have much effect on each other’s pronunciation or meaning. Other examples of languages that are agglutinative and are thus said to be difficult to learn include Basque, Korean and Hungarian.

Some, though not all, agglutinative languages also have rich systems of case markers, that are used not only to mark such grammatical functions as the subject, object, indirect object, possessor, etc. but also to indicate spatial relations. While some “difficulty rankings” will scare you with statements like “Basque’s complexities … lay in its 24 cases” or “anyone hoping to pick up Hungarian must also completely conquer its whopping 35 cases”, some of these statements overexagerate. The consensus among linguists is that Basque has only 12 cases and Hungarian has only 21 cases. Two of Hungarian’s cousins — Finnish and Estonian — have somewhat “poorer” cases systems (14 cases in Estonian, 15 cases in Finnish), while others have even richer case systems: for example, certain dialects of Komi have up to 27 cases. By the record-holder in terms of the number of cases is a Dagestanian language Tabasaran with its 46 cases!

While it may appear daunting to learn so many cases, in Finno-Ugric languages, such as Finnish or Hungarian, the form of the case morpheme is the same regardless of what noun it attaches to. The situation is quite different in Slavic languages like Russian or Polish, which have fewer cases (for instance, Russian has “mere” six cases), but the forms of the case morphemes differ depending on what noun you attach the case morpheme to (these different types of nouns are known as “declension patterns”, and they are closely related to but not exactly the same as “genders”). For example, the dative (singular) in Russian is -e if it attaches to knig- ‘book’, -u if it attaches to stol- ‘table’ or -i if it attaches to mater- ‘mother’. Thus, instead of learning one set of 15 case affixes in Finnish, for Russian you need to learn three sets of six (i.e., 18) case affixes, as well as to know which affixes to attach to which nouns. Besides, to master the Russian case system you will need to learn the various exceptions, which too are more common in fusional languages like Russian than in agglutinative languages like Finnish. My conclusion: agglutinative languages may be somewhat easier to learn (at least, in terms of the memory load) than fusional languages; the only truly scary thing about agglutinative languages is the term itself!

And what of Arabic? One of chief reasons it lands in one of the top spots in the “difficulty ranking” is the script, which uses different shapes of letters word-initially, -medially and -finally, but has no letters to record vowels. Another difficulty often listed is the dialectal problem; however, most students of Arabic as a foreign language will be learning Modern Standard Arabic rather than one of the 40 or so colloquial varieties, spoken from Morocco to Egypt, from Syria to Iraq and the Persian/Arabic Gulf. Grammatical difficulties one should be prepared to face include the unfamiliar Verb-Subject-Object order (vs. the English Subject-Verb-Object order), dual number (in addition to the familiar singular and plural), three cases and two genders (which, all in all, should be much easier to learn than the Hungarian or Russian case+gender systems) and multiple verbal forms. A really unusual phenomenon that Arabic shares with Hebrew is its non-concatenative morphology. In a non-concatenative language, unlike in more familiar languages such as English, Spanish or Russian, grammatical meaning -– for example, plural number on nouns or past tense on verbs -– is expressed not through adding a suffix to the nominal or verbal root/stem, but through changing the vowels in the stem. Typically, the consonants are part of the noun or verb root, while vowels -– and where they are placed in relation to the consonants of the root -– constitute the “template” (hence, non-concatenative morphology is also known as “root-and-template morphology”).

Finally, one other language that I found in one of those lists of “difficult to learn languages” — to my great surprise — was Icelandic. It is certainly true that “many Icelandic phonemes don’t have exact English equivalents” — remember the difficulties that many American journalists had with that Eyjafjallajökull volcano?! Other perceived difficulties of Icelandic include “its archaic vocabulary” and “complex grammar”. Really? It is true that Icelandic is one of the most conservative North Germanic (i.e., Scandinavian) languages that has kept the old noun declension and verb conjugations, but it is undoubtedly much closer to English and much more similar to it than, say, Chinese, Arabic or Hungarian, which makes it rather easier for an English speaker to learn.

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Source: Languages of the World

Author: Asya Pereltsvaig

How Foreign-Language Internet Strategies Boost Sales

Social media, lead generation, PPC campaigns -- it seems digital marketing has turned into the be-all and end-all of B2C communication and brand awareness. Companies have openly embraced digital marketing solutions in a mad race to reach, win and -- most important -- keep costumers in the highly competitive arena of e-commerce.
 
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But how about the challenges in trying to reach that coveted top Google search spot? Although English has long been the lingua franca of the Web, it has now reached a point of saturation. It is becoming incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to compete with those billions of optimized Web pages vying for consumer attention.
 
While businesses are engaging on all e-marketing fronts, there's a largely untapped opportunity that the vast majority have failed to embrace: foreign-language Internet. Due to less competition for keywords and domain names, and less content overall, the multilingual Web offers unparalleled opportunities to bolster sales in overseas markets easily and affordably.
 
With the exponential rise of non-English searches and the massive growth of emerging economies, savvy businesses could reap significant benefits by targeting far-flung markets in a linguistically and culturally sensitive way.
 
Companies shrewd enough to tap into this opportunity have experienced significant ROIs. Such has been American restaurant consulting and hospitality management company OnSite Consulting, which launched six language versions of their site in late 2010 and experienced significant foreign market growth: 20% of their revenue now comes from abroad.
 
Facts that substantiate the need for companies to address consumers in their mother tongue keep emerging, and hammer home the point that the road to better sales runs through the foreign-language Internet:

• 82% of European consumers are less likely to buy online if the site is not in their native tongue (Eurobarometer survey).
• 72.4% of global consumers are more likely to buy a product if the information is available in their own language (Common Sense Advisory).
• The English language currently only accounts for 31% of all online use, and more than half of all searches are in languages other than English.
• Today, 42% of all Internet users are in Asia, while almost one-quarter are in Europe and just over 10% are in Latin America.
• Foreign languages have experienced exponential growth in online usage in the past decade -- with Chinese now officially the second-most-prominent-language on the Web. Arabic has increased by a whopping 2500%, while English has only risen by 204%

The recession holding Europe and North America in its grip may be a bad time for business expansion at home. But not if you dare to look far enough. There are flourishing markets unscathed by the crisis. It's no secret that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are experiencing a spending boom, with consumerism growing at a rapid pace. What is more, an estimated billion people in the BRIC countries will be using computers by 2015 -- another reason why businesses should consider focusing their foreign digital marketing efforts on these countries.

Other emerging markets where there's less competition on the Web include the CIVETS countries -- Columbia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa. But beware -- as more and more businesses are realizing the potential of BRIC and CIVETS markets, competition for keywords and online presence is likely to grow.

After all, recession needn't be an obstacle to business expansion. As the semantics of the Chinese word for crisis (meaning both danger and opportunity) aptly demonstrates, businesses should overcome the fear of breaking into new markets and realize the only way to reap the benefits presented by the emerging markets is to fearlessly dip their toes in the multilingual Internet.

Source: MediaPost Communications
Author: Christian Arno