International Telecommuter has provided an excellent explanation of how and why both multilingual SEO and Website Translation are important to a company doing business globally. The comprehensiveness of a solid global web marketing strategy must take into consideration audiences who do business in other languages.

Before consumers can understand this translated content and see that a product meets their needs, they must be aware of the site that provides these solutions. An effective SEO strategy takes a business owner beyond localization of the content of his/her site and builds awareness for his/her business brand and allows potential customers to find the accompanying service(s)/product(s) with relative ease through localization and optimization of the site for local major search engines for a particular language.

Another wildly popular community website in the U.S. expands into China, by acquiring edodo.com. What's most interesting is, of course, the large numbers that always come up when talking about potential markets in China.

The eDodo acquisition in China moves Match.com into an emerging online personals market with unparalleled opportunity for growth. There are more than 64 million online singles in China, and the iResearch.com market forecast projects that the online dating category will nearly double in 2007.

For a company that is usually touted as being ahead of the game when taking its site and offerings global, this story smacks of a lot of shortsightedness, more symptomatic of other U.S. companies attempting to penetrate the Chinese market. If what the two articles below say is true, Google waited until after it was offering its Gmail in beta to the public before tracking down the owners of gmail.cn, rather than seek out the purchase of this domain while Gmail was in the R&D phase. (I am assuming, of course, that Google spent at least eight months researching, developing and branding Gmail before releasing it to limited public use.)

A legal source told Reuters that Google was trying to buy the Internet domain name, held by Beijing-based ISM Technologies.

It resembles Google's internationally known e-mail service, gmail.com, and the colors in which the two logos are written are similar. The ".cn" suffix is commonly used for Chinese domain names.

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At first glance, it’s easy to assume that the Chinese site is just a knock-off of the better-known Google email service. There’s just one problem: ISM claims that its Gmail service was here first. And there’s evidence to back up that claim.

For example, ISM registered the gmail.cn domain name on Aug. 1, 2003, according to whois information provided by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), which oversees the .cn top-level domain. That registration date predates Google’s April 1, 2004, announcement of its Gmail service by eight months.

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According to Wang, Google approached ISM about its use of the gmail.cn domain and the Gmail name in August 2004, shortly after Google launched its own Gmail service in the US. Those talks didn’t go anywhere, and the two companies are no longer in contact, she said.

Common Sense Advisory (CSA), the leading business consulting firm in the translation and globalization arena, came to town yesterday to give two workshops on Web Globalization and Translation Technology. Ben Sargent, their Senior Analyst, gave us a solid overview of trends in Web Globalization before getting down to specific descriptors CSA has built to readily tell what type of web globalization needs a given company will have based upon its product and service offerings, as well as how it has chosen to expand into the global arena.

These are good yardsticks for companies to use to determine how to efficiently manage the globalization of their websites. While it may seem that a no-brainer that a centralized, streamlined approach to content management and translation management is the best way to go, a lot of companies often opt at first to allow their regional and in-country partners to perform the lion's share of the translation and development of the regional websites. This might seem more cost-effective in the short term, because the corporate office is saving money initially on developing international content and deploying multilingual content. However, as Sargent showed us, this approach soon eats into the time of regional salespeople, who find they are authoring or translating new content as much as a quarter of their time, instead of selling.

The second workshop, Translation Technology, provides a great overview of the landscape of current Translation Management System (TMS) offerings. Sargent provided useful comparison of a variety of current systems that are deployed to automate the multilingual content workflow process, and connect to existing content management systems. If you are in or near any of the following cities in the next few months, and are looking to better facilitate your company's web globalization processes and technologies, it is well worth the low cost to attend.

Upcoming CSA Web Globalization and Translation Technology Workshops

• San Diego, California -- March, 2007
• Phoenix, Arizona -- March, 2007
• Vancouver, British Columbia -- April, 2007
• Portland, Oregon -- April, 2007
• Raleigh, North Carolina -- May, 2007
• Atlanta, Georgia -- May, 2007
• Toronto, Ontario -- June, 2007
• Detroit, Michigan -- June, 2007
• Salt Lake City, Utah -- June/July, 2007
• Denver, Colorado -- June/July, 2007
• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania -- to be announced, 2007
• Washington, DC -- to be announced, 2007