First Time Exporters: Full Support for your Website Translation
As the liberalisation of global commerce continues, more and more companies are joining the international market every year. Exporting has traditionally been seen as one of the most risky, and expensive ways to grow a business. While there are many pitfalls and challenges when trading internationally, the Internet offers an excellent way for you to reach out and grow your market share, without investing millions.
Global trade has never been so easy with the First time Exporters Guide. By working with Web-Translations you will have a partner to help you at every stage in your journey. We combine years of experience, with top-quality language and web skills to offer a hand-held, strategic approach to boosting your global trade.
(more…)
Olympic Gold Website Package – Fit for London 2012
Get Fit for London 2012 with the recently launched Olympic Gold Website Package by Web-Translations.
The 2012 London Olympics represents a great sales opportunity. As mentioned in the Getting Fit for the Olympics blog post published last week not everyone is capitalising on this sales opportunity. Do you want to go for Gold in the 2012 London Olympics?
Last year the largest ever campaign by a national tourist board was launched by VisitBritain; the £100 million GREAT Britain You’re Invited campaign. Primarily fronted by five major global celebrities who agreed to film TV ads and help promote Britain overseas.
As VisitBritain’s Mark Di-Toro says, “Now is the time to wave the British flag”. Thanks to the GREAT campaign a global audience of billions will have their eyes firmly set on Britain like never before. Will you be profiting from this interest?
Meet the Team: Dominic McGrath
Hi everyone!
I’ve recently joined the Web-Translations team as a project coordinator. I am originally from Bradford but familiar with the local area and went on to University of Manchester where I graduated in 2009 with a BA in German and Business Management.
Since graduating I have worked in a couple of different industries – finance and logistics – but always with the view to these jobs being short-term. I have been on the lookout for a role that could essentially combine my knowledge of another language with my innate passion for business, and have found a perfect match with Web-Translations. I furthermore believe I have found somewhere with the right tools to enable me to develop and to launch a successful career.
I am highly driven to achieve goals and to deliver for our customers as the business looks set to grow and expand into new markets, and what’s more, I look forward to helping other businesses do exactly the same.
Outside work I’m passionate about sport, in particular football, and have never wavered in my support of a team going through dire straits at the moment. I also love to travel and experience different cultures and meet people from different nationalities. Building on the time I spent living in Frankfurt, I travelled around Central and South America during the summer of 2010, and am certainly keen to do more of this! I got to go on the recent trip to the dmexco event in Cologne with my new colleagues Lynn and Cassandra, and am looking forward to putting my skills and newfound knowledge into practise.
I look forward to the challenge the future holds.
Wéb-Tränslatiôns partners with euro.message in Turkey
Web-Translations is pleased to announce its partnership with Istanbul-based e-marketing company euro.message.
euro.message is one of the 50 fastest-growing technology companies, and the largest e-marketing service provider in Turkey. (more…)
Benefits of Bilingualism
Recent research conducted by Dr. Athanasopoulus, of Newcastle University has revealed that bilingual speakers, or those who have studied a foreign language to some extent, see the world differently to monoglots. According to Dr Athanasopoulus, immersion in a foreign culture, including the use of another language, leads people to think in a completely different way: “There’s an inextricable link between language, culture and cognition”.
One example he provided, after conducting a study involving English and Japanese speakers, is that Japanese speakers tend to distinguish more between “light blue” and “dark blue” as there are two single Japanese words to describe these variations. He took into account the extent to which both languages are used, as well as the length of time spent in the countries in question, and used colours as an example due to the huge range of vocabulary that can be used in descriptions. He concluded that it is the extent to which a language is used, rather than the user’s proficiency that is most influential.
It was also discovered, by a study conducted in 2009 for a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, that speaking two languages improves a person’s ability to ignore distractions, and also to switch between two tasks. This has been linked to the necessity of blocking out one language when speaking in the other. There have also been supported suggestions that bilingualism can help reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.
The importance of bilingualism in terms of business has been highlighted in various articles in journals and newspapers. Immersion in another culture, as well as enhancing the distinction between various shades of colours, helps a person understand another culture, another language, and another way of life. This can be of immeasurable significance in the business world, when working on an international scale. Relations between two companies from different countries are likely to be stronger if both parties have an understanding of the way in which the other conducts business.
As if you needed any more encouragement, as The Daily Telegraph comments, “we are all designed to acquire language, but we are built to learn and accommodate more than just one: monolinguals are effectively under utilizing abilities by not tapping that potential.”
The world’s first multilingual social network: XIHA
Yet another social network – so what’s special about this one?
Finnish-created XIHA is the world’s first multilingual social network. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn do offer content in different languages, but this is supported through a monolingual implementation – you have to choose one language for the user interface, and would mostly update your status & post comments, etc in that language. Multilingual people are therefore not easily able to fully express themselves, as to choose one language might alienate friends and followers who do not understand it.
International Trade will keep your company afloat
Trade figures have recently shown an improvement in business exports – partly due to the weakened value of our currency. According to research, companies which trade internationally are more likely to stay in business longer and are usually more profitable than those which choose to concentrate only on domestic sales.
Exporting is a great way to expand your business – those who trade internationally grow faster and fail less often than companies that don’t, and the current weak curerncy makes our prices much more competitive, so there’s no time like the present.
Which products/services sell well in Europe?
Machinery, engineering products and consultancy, vehicles, aircraft, plastics, crude oil, chemicals, plastic and rubber, metals, foodstuffs, beverages, textiles & clothing are all in demand throughout the Eurozone, and a little effort in approaching a potential client in their own language can go a long way. Even something as small as localising key pages of your website for a foreign market show that you are interested in foreign customers, and are a forward-thinking company.
What about in Asia?
The main exports to China are electrical/mechanical equipment, precision instruments (medical, optical, photo, technical), plastics, iron & steel, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, and Automotive , Biotechnology & pharmaceuticals, Construction, Engineering, Financial services & ICT are all industries which have experienced growth there. As for India, there is a similar focus on engineering, sciences and technology, but in fact opportunities exist there for most sectors.
Where else should we look to?
Emerging markets have been identified in Poland, Vietnam, Mexico, United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, Singapore, and Argentina. Opportunities exist in various sectors in these countries, notably design, consultancy and engineering – the sectors that are most commonly successful for overseas trade.
Brazil and Russia will also continue to be key areas for companies trading internationally.