Other difficulties include managing content, technical obstacles, and cultural and legal barriers. The manner in which companies handle these is critical, said Forrester Research analyst Michael Putnam. During the last year, a number of companies have introduced products and services aimed at helping companies globalize their e- business sites. Companies that host Web sites, such as Digital Island, Exodus Communications and an increasing number of ISPs and telecom companies, including Frontier Global Center and Qwest Communications, have introduced services to overcome global network performance problems. The demand is so great, said Dataquest analyst Joseph Baylock, that most of the big ISPs are heading to this market as fast as they can.
Translation is a key part of tailoring an e-business site for a particular market.
A number of software translation products are available, but they're limited in that they don't handle idioms or technical material well. So GEIS and others are turning to tools that streamline the workflow involved in using human translation services to localize content for different markets. GEIS looked at several products but chose Global Sight Ambassador from Global Sight Corp. to translate GE TradeWeb into French, German and, soon, Italian because the company had experience and a solid methodology. We found there were a lot of vendors willing to let us pay for their research efforts to learn how to provide this capability, but we didn't have that kind of time, Irwin said. We needed someone in the industry who had the capability to sell us a tool or service, implement it and move forward.