Planning for the future: simple steps for startups before going global
The first days of a new business are an exciting time. Sometimes stressful, yes, and invariably busy — but new, dynamic and full of promise. After all, a startup isn’t a startup forever, which is why it’s fun to dream about how the business will grow and evolve over time. It’s more than just a matter of daydreaming though: the sooner you start planning for the future, and the more detailed your preparations, the easier you’ll find the next few years of growth and expansion.
A growing business faces a number of management challenges: strategic decisions, legal requirements, the logistics of opening new offices and supply chains, responding to financial pressures and opportunities… With so many factors to consider, it’s no wonder so many businesses struggle under the pressure of sudden growth. Who hasn’t encountered a business whose customer services slipped under the pressure of training dozens of new staff members, for example?
As if all of this wasn’t enough — the pressure of forward planning along with the constant moment-to-moment tasks and decisions — you should also be thinking about how your business will grow and adapt from a linguistic perspective. Not just in terms of your corporate image in your native language — which is important, make no mistake — but also how you plan to handle the eventual process of internationalisation. Even if your startup only targets a single national market to begin with, going global is a natural pathway to growth; as such, it’s in your interests to leave that pathway free of obstacles.
There are steps that businesses can take from the very beginning to make a future internationalization process easier — and pitfalls that they should avoid, as well, if they want to look good wherever they go in the world.
For starters, you should think about your company name and any other product names or other trademarks you plan to use. Which is to say, think about them even more than you already have done. You’ve probably already agonized over these at some length, but it’s worth adding one more item to your approval checklist. How does the name sound in other languages? There’s a possibility it could mean something harmless — consider for example the difference between the English word ‘handy’, meaning ‘convenient’, and the German ‘Handy’, meaning a cellphone. This might cause a little confusion, perhaps — but at worst, a word that seems innocent or even meaningless in your native language could mean something offensive or inappropriate in another.
There are plenty of stories about brands (often car manufacturers, for some reason) who launched a product in a new country, only to discover that it meant something disastrous which caused the product to flop. You may have heard of the Chevrolet Nova, for example, which was supposedly interpreted to mean ‘no va’ or ‘doesn’t go’ in Spanish. Sadly (or thankfully, for the auto companies), these stories seem to be mostly untrue: most companies are smart enough to focus-test products before launching them somewhere new. The stories persist, however, so if you don’t want to end up the butt of dinner-party jokes around the world, you should probably do your research and make sure that your company name doesn’t mean something else to someone in another country.
Even if any potential misinterpretation is basically harmless, it can be worth rethinking your name early on if it means you won’t have to change it later. In our globalized world, where customers use social media and other networks to communicate across national borders, maintaining a consistent identity can be incredibly beneficial in terms of carrying over existing brand loyalty and recognition when you expand your marketing and sales efforts into new territories. After all, why waste time and money on a rebranding exercise later on if you have the option of keeping the name you’ve always had?
This is the first step in thinking about your overall corporate identity in an international context. Ask yourself how you could internationalize yourself when the time comes. How would your brand identity be received elsewhere in the world? What changes will you need to make to grow beyond your current market, and how will you need to make them?
The most important thing is to start documenting everything from the very beginning.
If you’re a small startup with a single marketing representative, for example, then it may seem unnecessary to develop things like style guides, glossaries and corporate messaging documents. The truth, however, is that they are essential, even now. Although you may be the only one using them at the moment, you’ll be very glad you have them there and ready when you hand them over to a translation agency or other localization service provider. A lack of proper reference materials is one of the biggest causes of delays and blockages in localization projects, so pre-empt the problem and you’ll save yourself and your contractors an awful lot of headaches further down the line.
We can see why it’s important to start thinking about branding and marketing early — but what about your products and services themselves? These, too, require forward planning for international growth. For example, a tech startup selling software should develop products with an eye towards multilingual support right from the beginning, even if they have no immediate plans to implement multiple languages.
If and when the time comes to sell to a market that doesn’t speak your language, you’re going to want the changes to be easy to implement.
This doesn’t just mean something like interchangeable language files — although that’s definitely a lot easier than going through the entire software package line-by-line, finding and replacing each individual string of text — but also support for things like right-to-left reading directions, different character sets, and even interfaces that can be resized to accommodate different string lengths. It’s not uncommon for translated text to be noticeably longer in terms of character count than the original string, so — as always in software development — don’t hard-code anything unless you absolutely have to.
All of the above count as internationalization, but there’s still the localization side of things to consider.
If internationalization and localization sound like polar opposites to you, don’t be deceived — the two are in fact closely related.
Once you’ve prepared everything for use all around the world — that’s internationalization, remember — you can then start adapting it for use in specific places. That’s localization, and it means translating it into specific languages, adapting your products and services to meet local regulations and expectations, and more. Internationalization sets you up well for every localization task you’ll work on in the future, and understanding the kind of localization work you’ll need to do will help you plan your internationalization efforts that much better.
Don’t feel like you necessarily have to scrub all traces of national identity from your corporate image as part of the localization process: there are plenty of examples of successful businesses that use the global perception of their home country to great effect. Imagine a new Danish bakery chain, for example, or a Japanese startup manufacturing electronic devices, and think of the marketing power these nations already possess in these fields. A canny startup could exploit that existing perception to help promote themselves.
Of course, the drawback if you go down this route is that you are likely to be competing with well-established existing companies that already market themselves based on the same strengths. Bear in mind as well that stereotypes and expectations about a given country differ will differ from place to place. For example, you should take care not to insult one country’s people by telling them that a product they’re proud of is made better elsewhere. ‘Authentic American pizza — the best in the world’ might be a reasonable slogan in Austria or Switzerland, say, but it could potentially raise some eyebrows just across the border in Italy.
On the opposite side of the localization spectrum, passing yourself off as an entirely local business can be a risky proposition if your true roots lie elsewhere. Consumers are smart — they value authenticity, and they can spot fakery from a mile away. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to fit in with the local culture — that’s what localization is all about, after all — but you have to be smart about doing so, if you don’t want to be accused of insensitivity or cultural appropriation.
So what can a startup do to avoid making the wrong impression? It’s all about research.
Every country has its own customs, norms and standards that play into the way local businesses behave. These unwritten rules may be invisible to outsiders but clear as day to natives, so the best way to meet those kinds of expectations is to take advice from local experts in each target country. Work with translators who are native in the target language (of course) and outsource marketing, consulting and other services from providers who really, truly understand the regions you’re targeting. With their wisdom and your company’s unique identity, you’ll be able to find your own middle way between total foreignness and faux-localism.
There really is a huge amount of territory between these two poles, and every startup will reach a different equilibrium depending on its industry, its target market, its marketing style and more. You can go hyper-local with highly autonomous offices rooted in national communities, or position yourself as an internationalist, egalitarian company that makes every effort to treat every country the same: from a localization perspective, either approach, and everything in between, is entirely viable. What matters is that you respect local cultures, remain consistent in your approach, and — of course — that you plan ahead as far as you can.
If you’re thinking of going global with your own brand, feel free to get in touch with me to discuss the ins and outs of translation services in further detail.
If you’d like to read more about getting the best deals and results from translation providers, you can also visit our blog at http://www.translatorsfamily.com/blog/for-clients or read our free ebook at The Ultimate Buyers’ Guide to Translation.
The article is provided by Oleg Semerikov, a translator and general manager of Translators Family, a boutique translation agency specialising in business and technical translation.
As a translator and a translation agency manager, I’m here to translate, transcreate, and support your projects in new markets.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on July 30, 2018.