Category Archives: US Hispanic Market

Hillary Clinton leads the presidential translation race, says Lionbridge

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Lionbridge evaluated the Spanish-language Web sites of the presidential candidates and found that Hillary Clinton offered the highest percentage of translated content for Hispanic voters.

Hillary Espanol

Lionbridge evaluated the sites of Clinton, Obama, and Edwards on the Democratic site and Romney on the Republican side. It appears that Huckabee and McCain have more or less given up on the Spanish vote, as they offer no Spanish content.

The Clinton site offers 210 Spanish language pages versus 2,482 English language web page — 8.4%.

I know, this doesn’t sound like much, but it’s well ahead of Romney’s site, with just 4% translated content, and Obama’s paltry 1%.

What about Edwards? Edwards offers only one page of translated content, what I typically call a “local façade.”

I realize that language is a thorny issue these days, as it calls to mind thornier issue: immigration.

Nevertheless, Hispanic voters make up 9% of the electorate and could play a large role later this year in picking the next president.

Lionbridge also commented on several other issues, like quality, content, and navigation. Speaking of navigation, I like how Lionbridge notes that placing the “Español” link in the upper right corner is a best practice. This is something I have advocated for a number of years and I’m happy to say that more and more companies (and candidates) are placing their global gateways in this general vicinity.

To learn more, check out the press release.

The Web Globalization Report Card 2007

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Is just about ready for publication.

You can see which companies are included in this year’s report here. This has been a particularly exciting report to write because there are some very clear trends developing. There are also a few new entrants to the Top 10 list. Here’s who made the Top 10 list last year.

If you want advance notice of when the report publishes, please be sure to sign up for our free email newsletter: Web Globalization News.

Web Globalization and the Marketing Executive: A New Report

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Byte Level Research and MarketingSherpa recently polled 2,000 executives on their Web globalization activities and plans.

We asked what executives are spending on Web globalization, what languages their Web sites support — what languages they planned to add. We asked about Spanish localization for the US market. We measured executive awareness of Web localization vendors.

We gathered the results together into a 54-page report with 39 charts. We also included a handy introductory section on Web globalization.

Website Globalization Report 2007

This report is now available for purchase here: Website Globalization Report 2007.

I will also post the report in the Global by Design members portal so enterprise subscribers can access it after that date.

And I plan to write an article about the survey in the next issue of Global by Design. If there is one key takeaway from this survey, it’s that smaller companies have embraced Web globalization in a big way — and the forecast for growth is significant.

MotionPoint Benefits from Rush to Develop Localized Web Sites for US Hispanics

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MotionPoint announced today that it was now hosting a Spanish-language pandemic flu Web site for the US Dept. of Health & Human Services.

The site is located at http://espanol.pandemicflu.gov.

I first profiled MotionPoint in December of 2005. The company is part translation agency, part content management tools provider. MotionPoint effectively hosts the Spanish-language site on its servers and provides embedded pointers that manage any links between the English-language site and the Spanish-language site. MotionPoint also scans the English-language site for any changes to content. When a content change is detected, the MotionPoint people translate the content automatically. What this means is that the client has to do nothing — no files to handoff, not tools to purchase, nada. And this is resonating with companies and government agencies.

Of course, there are tradeoffs to this approach. For one, the client is locked in to the MotionPoint solution. This isn’t something that you can just take with you and give to some other vendor to manage — MotionPoint is the only company that I’m aware of that offers this solution. You also can’t bid out your translation pricing because MotionPoint is the exclusive vendor.

That said, there will always be those clients who want and need to outsource everything and, as a result, MotionPoint appears to be on a roll.