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DEFINITION
Web site globalization is the configuring of a company's Web site so it can be used to market and sell products outside its home country. It's critical that the site be customizable in a variety of ways, including linguistically and culturally, so it's accessible, understandable and inoffensive to customers in other parts of the world. This also means accommodating differences in .local laws, currencies and delivery options.
FOR THE E-BUSINESS that has decided to globalize, a number of unique technical issues spring up.
At first blush, many U.S. companies may think the only challenge to making a site accessible to foreign consumers is finding a good translator.
That, experts say, is the least of their worries.
Charles Baxter, president and CEO of Etranslate Inc. in San Francisco, and David Lawson, the company's chief technology officer, consult with a number of clients to help translate their Web sites for foreign markets.
"You [need] a strategy where you can have dynamic content flows," Lawson says. "You have to come up with a site that is language-neutral. You don't build it for the U.S. You build it for the world."
The biggest and most costly problem for companies, say Baxter and Lawson, is having to re-create Web sites from scratch because the original was programmed with English text embedded in the...