Web gurus help retailers find a common language

September 3, 2008

By Jonathan Birchall in New York

US retailers such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot advertise to America's Hispanic consumers on Spanish-language television. Some, such as JC Penney, operate bilingual customer service centres that can take orders over the phone.

But online shopping, which now accounts for about 7 per cent of US retail spending, has largely remained an English language experience - because getting a rapidly changing e-commerce website to speak Spanish as well entails much more than hiring a few translators.

"It traditionally involves a lot of IT infrastructure work. And one of the big obstacles is the idea that they'd have to invest, or hire someone to manage a Spanish language site . . . and retail is such a low-margin business," says John Yunker of Byte Level, a consultancy focused on website globalisation.

But there are signs of change ahead, driven largely by the growing success of a web services company, MotionPoint, which set out to create a technology-based solution to the problem of getting a single website to speak more than one language.

Since it was founded in 2000, MotionPoint has expanded rapidly over the past two years to a client list that now includes more than 200 companies, including Delta Air Lines, JetBlue, Amtrak and Domino's Pizza.

MotionPoint still uses human translators. But, according to Will Fleming, its chief executive and founder, translation only accounts for a quarter of the activity involved in creating a multilingual version of a site; IT infrastructure and site management challenges make up the rest.

"We are a technology company, not a translation company," he says. "We don't claim to actually translate the words faster than anyone else."

When a customer wants to access a foreign language version of a particular site, page or item, a MotionPoint server passes on the request to the original site. The response, in English, prompts MotionPoint to retrieve a previously translated version of the page or item held in its own stored data and send it on to the customer.

The foreign language versions of each page or product are kept updated by human translators, who use software that ensures the translation fits the space available on the page. They are also automatically alerted to changes made on the original site, enabling material to be updated within a few hours rather than the days required by a "traditional" operation with translators not working directly on a web-based system.

Chuck Whiteman, who handles client relations for the company, says that its claims have often been met by scepticism - such as its ability to launch a fully translated site within three months, against the one year or more required by other solutions. Delta Air Lines, he says, challenged the veracity of AmTrak's endorsement of the service before it started working with MotionPoint on its global reservation site in 2005. The scepticism, much of it from the IT department, was overcome, and Delta adopted the service for multiple languages, including Japanese.

MotionPoint's clients include international brands such as Puma and Delta, but the company says that about three-quarters of its business is now focused on the US Hispanic market. Late last year, it worked with Best Buy, the largest US home electronics retailer, to launch a Spanish version of its e-commerce site.

Best Buy, says Mr Whiteman, also initially doubted its claim it could produce a Spanish version of its site in less than 90 days. "In the end, we did it in 87," he says.

The comparative ease with which MotionPoint is able to translate entire sites has enabled some of its customers to adopt online languages they might not otherwise have considered. Amtrak, the US passenger train operator, initially used MotionPoint to create a Spanish-language reservation site. When it realised how popular this was with customers coming from Europe, it added a German-language version too.

Elsewhere, only a handful of US retailers offer bilingual websites, lagging behind banks, insurance companies, airlines and telephone companies. And most of the sites that are available in Spanish, such as Lowe's, the home improvement retailer, or Walgreens, the drugstore, offer only product information or advice rather than the opportunity to buy online.

But in a reflection of the growing interest among retailers, Amazon, the largest US online retailer, has used its own resources to launch Spanish pages for Spanish-language books and software.

Jupiter Research forecast last year that Hispanic consumers would account for 13 per cent of US sales on the internet in 2011.

Steve Davis of GSI Commerce, which provides global web services to retailers, notes that MotionPoint's solution is particularly suited to US sites, in contrast to Europe, where site owners wishing to serve more than one language group have simply constructed separate sites from the ground up. In the US, he says, translating a site into Spanish can be like "trying to change the engine when the car is going full speed down the road."

Mr Yunker at Byte Level says US retailers and others now going into Spanish online still have work to do, such as deciding whether to opt for a specific regional dialect or aiming for a more standardised version of the language. And there is still no standard approach over the best way of guiding Hispanic customers on-screen to the Spanish version of a site. But those customers, he argues, are likely to appreciate the effort, even those who speak perfect English.

"If you look at the demographics in the US, you have to plan for working in more than one language if you want to connect," says Mr Yunker. "Even if people are speaking in English, they might still be dreaming in Spanish."