John Yunker is founder of Byte Level Research and author of the widely acclaimed book, Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies and editor of Global By Design.
He has covered the emerging field of Web globalization for half a decade and has published a wide range of reports dedicated to best practices in Web localization and internationalization.
About this blog
Going Global focuses on the risks and rewards of expanding into new geographic and cultural markets, from Web globalization to international marketing to global usability.
Trend #2: Bilingual Toys Catering to the growing demand for products that promote dual language skills among children, toys that boast English and Spanish capabilities have gained momentum this year. Leading the list of bilingual toys for the toddler set are the Learn and Groove(TM) Alphabet Drum and the Learn and Groove(TM) Musical Table from LeapFrog®, both of which introduce the alphabet and encourage physical movement, vocalization and musical exploration in both English and Spanish. Taking a cue from two popular Nickelodeon programs, Fisher-Price® has introduced toys based on the adventures of Dora the Explorer(TM) and Go, Diego, Go!(TM) The Go, Diego, Go!(TM) Diego's Talking Rescue Center lets children go on rescue missions with Diego and his animal friends, while providing commentary from Diego in both English and Spanish. Dora the Explorer(TM) Magic Hair(TM) Fairytale Dora allows kids to imagine whisking Dora away on adventures through magical lands while she offers them encouragement in English and Spanish. The Pink Nitro Notebook(TM) from VTech® features Spanish language activities for developing readers.
How long before we begin seeing English <> Chinese toys as well?
Trend #2: Bilingual Toys Catering to the growing demand for products that promote dual language skills among children, toys that boast English and Spanish capabilities have gained momentum this year. Leading the list of bilingual toys for the toddler set are the Learn and Groove(TM) Alphabet Drum and the Learn and Groove(TM) Musical Table from LeapFrog®, both of which introduce the alphabet and encourage physical movement, vocalization and musical exploration in both English and Spanish. Taking a cue from two popular Nickelodeon programs, Fisher-Price® has introduced toys based on the adventures of Dora the Explorer(TM) and Go, Diego, Go!(TM) The Go, Diego, Go!(TM) Diego's Talking Rescue Center lets children go on rescue missions with Diego and his animal friends, while providing commentary from Diego in both English and Spanish. Dora the Explorer(TM) Magic Hair(TM) Fairytale Dora allows kids to imagine whisking Dora away on adventures through magical lands while she offers them encouragement in English and Spanish. The Pink Nitro Notebook(TM) from VTech® features Spanish language activities for developing readers.
How long before we begin seeing English <> Chinese toys as well?
Just when I thought the dark days of US xenophobia couldn't get any darker, I read that Utah has taken down its Spanish-language Web site.
According to the article, ""Two weeks ago, the state launched www.espanol.utah. gov, a Spanish-language companion to the state's informational Web site The Spanish-language site offered 10 pages of information on taxes, health services, driver licences, and work-force services selected from the state's 400-page Web site. But within days, callers complained to the governor's office that the site violated Utah's law making English the state's official language. The Spanish-language site was quickly taken down until its content can be reviewed, said Mower."
As US companies add Spanish content to their Web sites at a furious pace (Southwest Airlines, Home Depot, Lowe's), our federal, state, and local governments are going in reverse (or leaning in that direction). In a period of time when Americans should be learning second and third languages, we're having debates on "protecting" English. How long will it be before WhiteHouse.gov takes down its Spanish content?
First, here is a picture of the billboard in question:
According to the WSJ, VW was using this billboard to pitch its new GTI to young, bilingual Hispanics. But it appears that the billboard got a little too much attention. Says the article, VW quickly took the billboards down in three cities after they quickly generated a firestorm in Cuban-dominated Miami. "In English, Turbo-Balls might not sound so offensive," says Luis Perez Tolon, an instructor at Miami-Dade College who supervises a writing program for Spanish-language network, Telemundo. "But in the Spanish-speaking community, it will always have a vulgar connotation."
Now it could very well be that this result was very much what VW had intended. If the goal is to appeal to the younger set, sometimes offending the older set is the way to do it.
The Spanish-language edition of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is due out next week. Now this begs the question: Which Spanish is it being translated into? According to the press release:
As with the five preceding Potter books, the Spanish-language publisher,
Ediciones Salamandra, will publish three different versions of the same
translation, which reflect the idiomatic differences of the Spanish language
in Spain, Argentina, and the rest of Latin America. The total print run is
expected to exceed one million copies. The popularity of the series is
universal. More than 300 million copies of Harry Potter books in 63 languages
have been sold worldwide.
I have two great articles on the challenges (and business) of translating Harry Potter. Both are free and located here in PDF form:
A new study by the Roslow Research Group on behalf of Hispanic U.S.A. "challenges the assumption that the use of Spanish will decrease in coming years as succeeding generations of Hispanics are born and grow up in this country."
Key findings include:
By 2025, the number of Spanish-speaking Latinos in the United States will reach 40.2 million, up from 27.8 million today.
Fully two-thirds of Hispanics, five and older, will speak Spanish 20 years from now.
On average, 35 percent of third-generation Latinos in the United States speak Spanish.
The 18-and-older Spanish-speaking population will increase by 53 percent, to 15.2 million by 2025.
Web globalization typically refers to companies localizing their Web sites to expand their reach outside of their domestic markets. But it also may refer to companies who localize their Web sites to expand their reach within existing markets. A Spanish-language Web site for US companies is fast becoming a necessity (I'm compiling a list of companies that offers such sites here). And this survey is just another wake up call to companies who do not have yet Spanish-language business strategies.
And why stop with Spanish? Chinese for the US market is also a language we'll be seeing more of in years ahead.
According to Bloomberg, the US Hispanic population is growing three times more quickly than the US population as a whole.
Here's an article excerpt...
Hispanics accounted for half the U.S. population growth from July 2003 to July 2004 and numbered 41.3 million, about 14 percent of the population, as of July 1, 2004.
The U.S. population is about 296.3 million. Population growth from July 1, 2003, to July 1, 2004, was 2.9 million, the Census Bureau said, with half of that coming from Hispanics.
Over that period, the Hispanic growth rate was 3.6 percent compared with a growth rate of 1.0 percent for the population as a whole, the bureau said.
Given these statistics, it's little wonder that US companies are aggressively launching Spanish-language Web sites. I've compiled a growing list of these Web sites here.
According to this article, Quebec Premier Jean Charest has hinted that he might crack down on the spread of English in the workplace. Apparently French is losing its grip. albeit very slowly, in this Canadian Province.
The report I just completed on Web globalization would seem to support this trend. In 2003, we looked at language use on the Web sites of 121 major multinationals. French Canadian finished 7th overall. In our latest report, we studied 200 Web sites and French Canadian finished 12th overall. Of course, behind this drop were up-and-coming languages like Chinese and Korean.
Still, you have to wonder about the future of a language when the government requires people to speak it.
Conversely, there are groups within the US who want to force federal and state governments not to support Spanish.
Up until recently, only a handful of US banks have served the Hispanic population reasonably well. But that's all changed now that the Hispanic market is worth an estimated $700 million.
Recently, Spain's Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentina (BBVA) purchased Laredo National Bank, a regional bank based in Texas.
This may seem like a relatively minor development, but it is anything but minor. Spanish banks see an opportunity to grow in the US through the booming Hispanic market. As BBVA noted in its press release: "Step by step, we are firmly moving forward into the US Hispanic market."
US banks are also on an acquisition spree. Citigroup has purchased First American Bank, based in Bryan, Texas. And Wells Fargo announced plans to purchase First Community Capital, based in Houston, Texas.
A key to succeeding in the Hispanic market is focusing on remitances - money transfers between the US and foreign markets. According to a New York Times article, more than $13.4 billion flowed into Mexico from the US in 2003. This is big business. And banks are getting more creative in how they serve their customers. For example, Hispanic customers can now pay the mortgage of a family member based in Mexico without having to send money across the border. This saves the customer money and trouble and helps the bank increase customer revenue. Citigroup also has launched a binational credit card that can be paid off on either side of the border.
Growth prospects in the Hispanic market are bright. BBVA said that while 95% of people in the general US population have a checking account, only 65% in the Hispanic market have one.
As banks target the Hispanic market, there will be plenty of growth in terms of Web localization. I reviewed more than a dozen Texas and California banks and only found one that offered Spanish content: Laredo National Bank. And Web localization is just the most obvious opportunity for translation agencies; banks will also find they need to translate signage, loan application forms, advertising collateral and even human resources materials.
For a list of companies that currently offer Web sites for the US Hispanic market, we now offer a rapidly growing directory.
Multilingual Computing has published a "Guide to the Spanish Speaking World." It includes an article from yours truly on Web localization for the US Hispanic market; in the article I profile Southwest Airlines, which recently launched a fully featured Spanish-language flight reservation engine.
Additional articles talk about the variations of Spanish around the world as well as in-depth information on Spanish in the US market. Overalll, it's a great resource and best of all, it's free.
Since relocating to San Diego, I've been a regular at Lowe's. During my last visit I was asked to particpate in an online study.
I went home, plugged in the URL and here's what I found:
A bilingual marketing research study. I'm glad to see it. Coincidentally, I pitted the Spanish Web sites of Lowe's and Home Depot against one another in our recent report, Web Globalization and the World's Largest Companies.
The Lowe's Web site did quite well, but there is plenty of room for improvement. This market research study is a sign, to me at least, that Lowe's is just getting started with its online Spanish marketing efforts.
According to a new report by HispanTelligence, U.S. Hispanic purchasing power has surged to nearly $700 billion and is projected to reach as much as $1 trillion by 2010.
According to the report, the rate of growth is nearly three times the overall national rate over the past decade and will propel the aggregate disposable income of the nation's largest minority group to $699.78 billion in 2004.
Here are some juicy stats from Ford's press release:
About 42 percent of all minority businesses are Hispanic-owned, which is more than any other minority group. Ranks of Hispanic entrepreneurship has jumped 30 percent since 1998, and one out of 10 small businesses will be Hispanic-owned by 2007 – jumping to two million from 1.2 million.*
Hispanics also are among the most Internet-savvy of consumers. There are about 13 million Hispanics online, and the average time Hispanics spend online outpaces that of the general U. S. population, according to a study completed earlier this year by America Online and Roper ASW. The study says nearly half of Hispanics who are now using the Internet went online for the first time within the past two years, and now spend about 9.5 hours a week online. More than half say that access to content in Spanish is important to them.
According to Samuel Huntington, in Foreign Policy Magazine, the "unprecedented inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos form their own political and linguistic enclaves—from Los Angeles to Miami—and reject the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream."
Mr. Huntington is not the first American to spout the equivalent of "there goes the neighborhood" in response to a wave of immigration. The mid- to late-18th century saw similar views expressed by similar alarmists. And I suspect the Native Americans said the same thing when those Anglo-Protestants first hit the beach.
I disagree with his argument on many levels. And I found his writing downright nasty at times; nevertheless, I believe the article is worth a read because the underlying argument is not likely to go away anytime soon.
The San Antonio Express-News has an article on the growing number of bilingual (English and Spanish) ads.
Here's an excerpt:
There are "more Latinos in the United States than there are Canadians in Canada," Sosa said.
The Census Bureau has announced Hispanics are the nation's largest minority group, with a population of 38.8 million. And the Santiago Solutions Group, a national multicultural business strategy team, estimates the purchasing power of Hispanics will hit $675 billion this year.
"We find that smart marketers are doing crossover work more and more because they are recognizing the influential role that Hispanics have," said Manuel Machado of Miami-based Machado/Garcia-Serra Publicidad and president-elect of the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies based in Virginia.
For anyone who says that globalization is a one-sided game in which American is always the winner, I submit Kola Real.
Kola Real, known formally as Industrias Ananos, is giving Coca-Cola a run for its money south of the U.S. border. Based out of Peru, Kola Real has succeed by creating a product a lot like Coca-Cola, but cheaper.
According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Kola Real is doing pretty well outside of Peru too. It now has 4% of the Mexican cola market - the number one market for Coca-Cola. And it is only just getting started.
Here's an excerpt:
Coke and Pepsi once vied primarily with each other. Today both are fending off down-market alternatives -- either so-called B-brands such as Kola Real or private-label drinks sold by Wal-Mart and other big retail chains. These cheaper rivals can cut into Coke and Pepsi's profits and make it harder for them to raise prices to offset slowing sales.
The trend goes beyond Latin America. Big retailers in Germany, Great Britain and other European markets are selling more private-label cola, and B-brands are aggressive in Poland and Hungary.
One big reason: the switch to plastic. In the 1990s, plastic bottles largely replaced glass, offering a cheaper alternative that lowered newcomers' cost of entry in the soft-drink industry. Plastic also allowed larger bottles that could be sold cheaply in supermarkets. Supermarkets provide an important outlet for new competitors because Coke and Pepsi often dominate smaller stores.
Kola Real's strategy is simple: offer big sizes at low prices. In a Carrefour supermarket in Mexico City, a large display of Big Cola beckons shoppers with a price of about 75 cents for a 2.6-liter bottle. Nearby, bottles of Coke go for about $1.30 for a slightly smaller 2.5-liter bottle. On a recent day, housewife Lourdes Avila put four of the Big Cola bottles in her cart and said: "For that price, I'll try it."
In a few years we will see many more Kola-Reals take root and succeed against the major multinationals. Perhaps it is human nature (supporting a local company and an underdog) that helps fuel the success of these start-ups. And perhaps it's just common sense to go with the cheaper brand of cola. Most likely it is a little of both.
Globalization is funny. Just when you think you've created a global brand, people start yearning for its "localness." Take Coca-Cola. According to this article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, expat Mexicans are paying a premium for imported Coke.
Here's an excerpt:
"It has a different taste," owner Adela M. Trinidad, 30, explained in Spanish.
It's common for immigrants to seek out and buy products shipped from their homelands. For them, brand names such as Chandrika or Jarritos re-create Bombay in a bar of soap or Oaxaca in a fizzy tamarind drink.
But the attachment to Coke, Mexican-style, is another story.
The company is, after all, based in Atlanta. It is so symbolic of Uncle Sam that writer Salman Rushdie famously coaxed its consonants into a word for America's global dominance in economics and culture: Coca-Colonization.
What's more, cans and plastic bottles of the soda are a dime a dozen in the United States - or, actually, $7 a dozen. The Mexican Coca-Cola sold by Philadelphia-area distributors costs $10 to $12 a dozen.
I guess you just "can't beat the real thing."
PS: Ironically, Coke, with more than 50 country Web sites, does not offer a site for Mexico.
The trend of American companies building Spanish-language Web sites is now in full swing. We are now seeing health care organizations getting into the act, with Delta Dental of California now offering a Spanish site:
I always find it interesting to observe how Web sites incorporate their first localized Web sites. They rarely revise their navigation menu to point to the new site; instead, they create a special button or graphic that points to the page. Navigation almost always comes later, and even then this "global gateway" does not become a major element until there are several localized sites involved.
As shown here, the Spanish site maintains the same layout:
I would have recommended pulling the text out of the graphics to save time in localization. Assuming that additional language-specific sites are created, the less "embedded text" you have, the less work the localization will be.
Still, I'm happy to see more organizations dedicating resources to Spanish localization. With 40 million native-language speakers in the U.S., it's just a matter of time before most organizations follow suit.
Walgreens claims to be the first national pharmacy retailer with a Web site designed specifically for Hispanics: WalgreensEspanol.com.
One major problem with this new site -- it's near-impossible to find unless you already know the URL. Try visiting the main Walgreens home page: www.walgreens.com; as of today, there is no link to be found that will take you to the Spanish site. I suspect that link will appear shortly but the sooner the better; after all, I would bet that the people in charge of this new site are going to base its success partly on increased site traffic.
With the publication of Madonna's much-hyped children's book, The English Roses (Las Rosas Inglesas), Scholastic is launching a Spanish-language imprint, Scholastic En Espanol. According to the press release, Hispanics currently account for 17% of all children in the United States and by 2005, Latinos will constitute 25% of the U.S. population. The imprint will include translations of Clifford, Captain Underpants, and Goosebumps books, as well as original Spanish-language titles.
Scholastic has no Spanish-language Web content just yet, but I would imagine the RFPs are out right now. It's also unclear if the imprint will use include the tilde over the n. The press release left the tilde off of "Espanol." Accented characters are just one of the challenges English-only speakers encounter as they begin working with different languages. For starters, it's not clear how to even create these characters. To compound matters, URLs currently don't support accented characters (though that will change).
Consider the CNN Spanish site. The URL is http://cnnenespanol.com while the page includes the tilde, as shown here:
Nextel recently launched a Spanish-language site to better market to Hispanic customers. Here is the site: www.nextel.com/espanol.
This is good first step. But Nextel still has a long way to go. In all, less than 20 Web pages (by my count) have yet to be translated, putting it well behind competitors Verizon Wireless and Cingular, who both offer a great deal more Spanish content. But Nextel is still ahead of Sprint PCS, currently without any Spanish-language site.
One a picky but important note, notice how the URL ends with "espanol" not "español." URLs currently don't support accented characters, though this should change over the next two years. Nextel would have made things easier for itself and its users if it simply used the "es" suffix. See www.hrblock.com/es. Of course, it could be worse. Bellsouth offers no link at all on its home page to its Spanish-language site: www.miportal.bellsouth.net. And Verizon Wireless uses this cryptic URL: http://espanol.vzwshop.com/gw/.
Overall, Nextel is off to a good start. Now when is Sprint PCS going to catch up?
Corporations, anxious for growth, are increasingly opening their eyes to the U.S. Latino market -- a market that now has its own Web site: New Generation Latino Consortium.
In the past two weeks alone we've seen two important new Web site launches:
According to their press release, the site took four months to localize and included more than 200 Web pages.
Verizon also launched a Spanish-language site: www.verizonwireless.com/espanol. Verizon also provides a dedicated team of Spanish-speaking customer service representatives and in many Verizon Wireless Communications Stores. It also recently launched blah!, a mobile chat service that supports English, Spanish and Portuguese.
The research firm comScore Networks just released the results of a survey of more than 50,000 U.S. Hispanic Web surfers. This study found that U.S. Hispanic Internet users outnumber the total online populations of many Spanish-speaking nations. According to the study:
The U.S. Hispanic online population, which comprises approximately one third of the total U.S. Hispanic population, is 11 percent larger than the total online population of Spain, and 4 percent larger than the total online population of Mexico, Argentina and Colombia combined.
What Does this Mean for U.S. Marketers?
These findings are just further proof that companies cannot truly reach all Americans without multilingual, multicultural marketing campaigns. Interestingly, the study does point out that not all of the online Hispanics necessarily prefer Spanish-language Web sites. According to the study:
The comScore data reveal that approximately 51 percent of U.S. online Hispanics prefer to use English as their language of choice at home, with 21 percent preferring to use Spanish and 27 percent stating an equal use of English and Spanish.
John Yunker is founder of 
