If you didn't have enough reasons already to begin marketing your products or services to China, and translate your corporate site into Chinese, here are two more:

BEIJING (AP) -- China's population of Internet users, already the world's second-biggest after the U.S., has jumped by nearly 20 percent over the past year to 123 million, with broadband access soaring, the government said Wednesday.

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The number of Internet users in China with broadband service jumped by 45 percent over the past year to 77 million, or about two-thirds of the total online population, the Internet agency said.

John Kennedy, at Global Voices Online, asks:

One day soon, when content flow between Chinese and English websites reaches a reciprocal balance, when newspapers, textbooks and bloggers everywhere go bilingual, how well-positioned will you be?

Some U.S. businesses and schools are scrambling to assert a successful answer to this question, others are banking on the hope that the pace of doing business in English will continue to indefinitely outmatch the rate of new web users who prefer to read and write Chinese.

Many people underestimate the importance of language when doing business globally, or the concept of it gets trivialized in the face of the notion that "English is the language of business." However, there are many new channels of success that open up for companies that choose to emphasize the importance of language when doing business, and when marketing to people in other locales.

"Now, the pace of globalization is quickening and the whole world is more like a small village, the demand of communication is becoming more and more urgent. Language is the first step. Only after the language can people exchange their ideas," is how Zhao Guocheng, deputy director general of the National Office from Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, puts it.

***UPDATE***

April is Multicultural Communications Month. McElroy Translation will be running a special edition of its monthly newsletter that you won't want to miss. Sign up now if you haven't already! (McElroy's monthly newsletter contains full articles from industry leaders related to doing business globally and best practices for translation. Its content is generally separate from what appears here at translationebuzz.com).

I discovered a new global-trade-focused magazine with a great little informative article today. It highlights many of the ideas that we reiterate here at translationebuzz.com. Michael Hick also wrote a guest column for E-Buzz awhile back on multicultural communication in business that a reader may find helpful.

One billion people will have access to the Web by year’s end—and more than 70 percent of them will speak a language other than English. Think what this exponential leap in multi-cultural commerce is doing (and, more importantly, going to do) to world trade! And what that will mean for your organization.

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Successful multicultural communication is more than just translating existing material from English. Rather, it must embrace the social nuance of separate markets. That entails culturally sensitive imagery, appropriate inter-personal communications dynamics, and the right jargon or slang. Are you concerned about what your marketing, training or product information is saying to the outside world? Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to receive information on doing business with a different culture each month.

Monster.com has a great article on Multicultural Marketing. It gives this example: a non-Chinese marketing expert might know that in Chinese culture the number eight is propitious and four is bad, but he cannot truly understand what a Chinese immigrant wants –- or fears -– from an American bank. Without that understanding, a marketer can't communicate with his client's target audience: Chinese bank customers. And that's why, according to Cheng, it's vital for marketers to be members of their target audience. (Of course, McElroy chooses native translators and reviewers for all of our projects.)

Other excellent articles include:

• Language Diversity
• Flaunt Your Fluency
• Talk Up Language Skills
• Foreign-Language Degrees
• Bilingual Workers
• Where Are the Marketing Jobs?
• Why Diversity Counts

For more a good basic multicultural etiquette overview, read: How not to be a cultural knucklehead in a global business world from Cubicle Nation.

You may wish to consider asking for a cultural assessment of your website and marketing materials before McElroy translates them to ensure that your information is appropriately received by the target audience.

One of McElroy’s operational goals for 2005 was to develop a disaster recovery plan. We did complete this goal… but why does it matter to you?

As one of the largest translation companies in the United States, with 38 years of experience translating large volumes of time-sensitive and otherwise critical documents for Fortune 500 clients around the world, we believe we owe it to you to be as prepared as possible to continue service in the event of a disaster. We also feel responsible to our employees, for returning them to full employment and keeping them employed after a disaster, and doing our part to support our business community economy.

Setting the industry standard in customer satisfaction

Why have a vision and why have this vision?

• If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.
• High quality, competitive prices and fast turnaround are a baseline market expectation. McElroy strives for additional differentiation.
• This vision adds customers and revenue through building our brand reputation in ways that money can’t buy. We want our services, products, and business practices to exceed expectations and delight clients.

As a strategy for growing and differentiating our company, Setting the industry standard in customer satisfaction is an extension of McElroy’s historic personalized service.

Evidence of this belief in the value of client care include:

• Staff resources dedicated to quality assurance,
• Creation of dedicated customer service,
• Tracking and taking action on client complaints and late delivery,
• A strong customer satisfaction guarantee.

By nature of the concept a company vision is a long-term undertaking. Owning a vision means believing it and earning it until customers say it about you, not you saying it about yourself. It’s an ongoing journey. A vision will convey meaning externally when all employees:

• Believe it, earn it, own it.
• It comes from the “top-down and inside-out.”
• Employees feel empowered to make decisions in the best interest of clients.
• Management supports those decisions.
• Employees demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit in decision-making.

To help achieve vision immersion in company culture McElroy is introducing the Diamond Employee program. Anyone can nominate a “Diamond” employee for special recognition. We want employees to “get caught in the act” of supporting the McElroy vision of Setting the industry standard in customer satisfaction. Winning employees each receive a crisp $50 bill. Every nomination will be entered into an annual drawing to be held early in December for $1000.

The jury is in – data supports why our historic focus on customer satisfaction is the best direction for our future vision.

• Customer dissatisfaction is the #1 reason customers leave companies by a huge margin.
• When polled, companies underestimate customer dissatisfaction by at least half.
• Bad news (about a company) is usually louder than good news.
• 96% of customers are vulnerable to being lured away.
• A 2% increase in customer retention rate can equal a 10% decrease in costs.

This is hard hitting data. Our vision will ensure our success as McElroy differentiates from competitors by Setting the industry standard in customer satisfaction.

If you or your company has considered entering the Korean market, understanding Korean consumer preferences will impact how you market your product or service. You may have read how U.S. companies like Wal-mart and G.E. are pulling out of Korea, and think this is a market where a U.S. business can’t succeed. This isn’t necessarily true, but your brand may or may not do well as in the Korean market. Of course, the verbiage you use in the marketing copy, as well as adapting the website for a Korean audience remain necessary steps to doing business successfully (which McElroy Translation can help provide). However, having a good understanding of how your brand itself will be perceived will ultimately determine the success of your product or service in Korea.

A quick review of the latest news items on Korean consumer preferences for U.S. brands (or lack thereof) reveals that U.S. companies could do more to understand Korean brand attitudes. A box store retailer fails in Korea even as South Korean department store sales continue to rise because it doesn’t see the Korean shopper’s preference for an upscale shopping experience. MP3 players and other consumer electronics are purchased based on stylistic preferences, i.e., how will this look as a fashion accessory rather than what are the technical features or overall utility of the product. Restaurants like TGI Friday’s succeed while McDonald’s continues to experience brand erosion. Healthy beverages are preferred over Coca- Cola. Being seen with the latest, sleekest model of cell phone is of utmost importance to a large number of the Korean population.

Translation memory technology facilitates “recycling” template content that is duplicated between client documents. It is NOT machine translation. Rather, it is a productivity tool used by translation professionals. McElroy has traditionally used the industry leader Trados® for TM technology to ensure consistent quality and decrease client translation costs whenever possible. Unique translation memories are maintained for McElroy clients.

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The costs may not be negligible; in Los Angeles, the largest and most diverse local election jurisdiction in the country, election officials spend less than 10 percent of their budget to provide language assistance in Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese. But the benefits are clear: When bilingual assistance is provided, voting participation increases and members of the affected groups have a better shot at winning elections. Hispanic voter registration in Yakima County, Wash., went up 24 percent after the Justice Department sued the county for failing to comply with the law. After Justice reached an agreement with Harris County, Texas, turnout of Vietnamese American voters doubled, and the first Vietnamese American was elected to the state legislature.

Here is an informative report that looks at how collaborative communication is shaping up worldwide. It shows that there are different practices and expectations for project collaboration depending upon different parts of the world.

Advances in information and communications technologies have revolutionized the business environment of the 21st century, making it possible for people in different cities, states - even nations - to work together on one team. If businesses are to succeed in this global culture of collaboration, experts say they must understand how people in various parts of the world prefer to communicate with one another.

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Kostner says business professionals in the Asia-Pacific region are also the most frequent telecommuters. "That surprised me a lot. I expected most of collaboration [there] to be face-to-face, but in fact, there are a lot of people that are doing telecommuting and using technologies to get a hold of one another."

The Meetings Around the World study - sponsored by Verizon Business and Microsoft - also found that people in the Asia Pacific region feel that meetings conducted via audio or videoconference technologies can be more productive than meeting face to face and less costly.