[00:00:03] Speaker A: The following is our conversation with John Yonker. He is the co founder of Bilevel Research and has authored over 20 annual editions of the web Globalization Report. Card in this conversation, we are talking about his most recent article in multilingual magazine in the August issue of 2024. Five weblog globalization best practices that have stood the test of time enjoy.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Sure thing.
This article, well, it's quite simply a product of having been part of this industry for 20 years and studying the evolution of global websites. And the reason I felt it important to write the article is every year there's researchers such as myself, pundits such as myself, who will gladly tell you what you should or shouldn't do with your website. And not all of this advice necessarily is the best advice.
Sometimes it reflects the time, the technologies that we live in. But I think it's really, really important to take a step back. And I always say actions speak louder than words. And if you look across a 20 year, a ten year, 20 year time horizon, you start to see what practices have stood the test of time, meaning they actually work. They're not just trendy, they're well grounded. And that's the purpose of this article, is to highlight what has worked, what has stood the test of time, and how it's really benefited a number of the companies that have exhibited these best practices.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: I was surprised when I was reading the article, and surprised and also engaged and inspired by the visual representations, what worked, what didn't work. And what do you think is the thing that has allowed for companies to allow those transitions, adaptations over 20 years of time to actually make the right decisions? Because I presume, like you imply, that there are other practices that have not stood the test of time and companies that have not made the adaptations and have not being able to make an impact in the new digital world.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
[00:02:23] Speaker B: You're absolutely right. And it's not so much that if you exhibit a poor practice that your company is destined to fail, it will definitely cause additional friction and definitely additional expenses, potentially a lot of problems at the local level if you don't embrace some of these best practices. The one that I began with was around global templates.
I say global templates enable global success. And I point to two companies in particular, Philips and Amazon.
Because I've produced this web globalization report card for 20 years now. I capture a lot of screenshots every year.
I included a screenshot of Amazon and Philips in 2004 or five. And then now you can see that the templates have largely remained the same and what that has allowed and globally, and that's most important. So they use a template across all locales and doing so enables you to scale.
If you go back to 2004 and five, when I began consulting, it was common back then for a lot of companies to believe, and I, and fervently, so that every country needed its own design, its own look and feel, its own design. And they did that, and some companies still do that, but to much less degree now because it really wasn't that scalable. And not only that, you can balance global consistency with local flexibility. And a global template can be really elemental and foundational and still allow your countries, your regions to create websites that really are locally relevant and locally functional and so forth. So a global template doesn't need to be overly restrictive. And there is a balance. And companies that have found that balance have done really well over the past 20 years.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: Very interesting. And we are in the process of restructuring our own website at multilingual and also creating a bunch of landing pages for specific events. And we have come across that challenge, which is what is the layout? One of the things that you would find is that there are tons of templates, but they're very restrictive when you go with templates from, let's say, WordPress. But then there are others that in terms of layout they are very simple, similar to how the Japanese, and we were talking about this with our team, how the Japanese have everything in the first landing page, and that's to reduce anxiety, not to increase it. And there are some templates that we found that are like that, that all the information for an event, for example, you don't have to scroll anywhere, it's just everything, it's in there. If you were to translate it, the only thing you will need to think about is kind of like the length of our words and of course characters in different places. But it seems that it's much easier now to create that global template than it was 20 years ago.
Would you agree with that? That it's easier to create globally relevant websites now than it was 20 years ago?
[00:05:41] Speaker B: It's significantly easier. And in fact, 20 years ago we did not have Unicode fully rolled out as a global character encoding at that 20 years ago there were different character set encodings for different scripts. And so that made it much more difficult. So now you can use Unicode as your default encoding.
And I should caveat this to say there are justifiable exceptions to the rule and there are certain markets where I've seen that, and you mentioned Japan. There are very viable exceptions for Japan and China and certain markets, but generally a global template can work. Even with those exceptions in mind, I often say global design is less design. So what I'm talking about is when you think template, you're really scaling it really, really down. And you can have degrees of templates, you can have a global template, you can have a regional template, so your superset is your global template and then you drill down from there. But in terms of efficiencies, it does so much because what happens with these global companies is they will say, okay, we're going to do a global promotion. If you have a global template, you now can create art and hero images that can be rapidly deployed across all of the regional and local websites versus having to be recreated country and region at a time. And so there is so much efficiencies that can be gained. And what it really does is it empowers your local and regional content teams and marketing teams to focus on what they do best, which is creating content at the local level, as opposed to redesigning a website that doesn't necessarily need to be redesigned at that level.
I will say one other thing.
I've seen a lot of mistakes made when creating global templates in which the local and regional teams are not engaged or involved in the process. It shouldn't just happen at headquarters and be just created at headquarters and then just sent around the world and all the other teams suddenly have to embrace it. That often does not work because the local and regional teams will find many reasons why it doesn't work for them.
If they're involved in the creation of the global design to global templates, the odds of success are considerably greater.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: That is fantastic insight. And you also have four more of those best practices. You do say flags are best left on flag polls, you have country code to provide local front doors. Performance still matters and language is a feature. I love the titles because we can put them all together. They are really great.
Were there any that you were that was competing at 6th place and it's just didn't make it to the fifth place?
[00:08:38] Speaker B: Oh gosh, that's a good question. There's always considerably longer lists in the back of my mind. Well, one is has to do with the local facade. And I always advise companies to avoid creating local facade. And a local facade is basically a localized website that really isn't localized.
There's a few translated pages perhaps, but nothing beyond that. And that actually is a really poor practice.
And sadly I still come across a lot of companies that do that and what it actually does is it creates a negative feedback loop. So if a company decides to go global quickly and they just rush to it and they don't really budget it and plan out the localization for a lot of countries and they just say, okay, were going to go into Romania, well do a few pages for that market.
Users are not stupid. They might visit that website and realize theres nothing there and then theyll go back to the global website and self translate through Google or whatnot.
The reason it creates a negative feedback loop is that the local users in these markets who are underserved by these local facades become much more elusive when you try to get them. Let's say you reinvest and you actually fill out the content on these localized websites, the odds of getting them to come back are considerably greater.
The local facade is just, it does more harm than good. I always say if you don't have the resources or the commitment to localization for a certain market, don't even bother. You're actually going to do a better service to yourself and your users because as they say, you don't get a second chance to make a first impression. Is that right? Am I saying that right?
Anyway, yeah.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: And there is something really interesting that to me was personally counterintuitive, which is the flags are best left on flag poles.
It's similar to something that we did recently inside of multilingual and we thought it was going to be a and it was b. In this case, I would have guessed that people or that it was more effective to have the flags. But when I read it and I was like, it is right, I don't need the flags. This is completely right. I just, it was, it made so much sense once I saw it, like visually.
[00:11:18] Speaker B: Oh, good. Well, yeah, there, there are some cases where flags can be useful, but I advise avoiding them for your global gateway or any navigational purpose. They don't scale well. There's no real usability upside, I'm happy to say. A number of global companies have since moved away from them. I noted Apple, because Apple, because Apple had used flags for so many years as a consultant, it was always difficult to convince another company to not use flags because they would say, well, Apple uses flags and they must be right. Now I can say Apple does not use flags. They've moved away from flags and now, and they're not alone. Spotify has moved away from flags most recently, so it's not a scalable approach and it also can lead to geopolitical issues, which I don't think any company wants to wade into geopolitical issues.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: That is a really deep one. When you go with countries or languages rather than you immediately strip away the frontiers, the borders, and then you're left with a different set of rules. Yeah, it's more articulated. It's very interesting. It's a very interesting approach and that's what I'm noticing when we are looking into all of the options. And the country codes were also counterintuitive for me. Is it provided local front doors is your third one? That was. I was also surprised. I was like, I thought we were going to move away from that, but incredible.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: Well, for some countries, and this is not for all countries, but in some countries around the world, country codes really do matter. There's a usability improvement there. Most importantly, there's a degree of trust associated with country codes. And we see this in Germany, we see this in Canada where you really do need to support and use a country code in your front door if you're going to.
It's not so much an SEO upside it used to be, but Google still gives some weight to country codes.
But I think it's more of a conveying a truly localized front door to users.
Of course, Amazon is one example. They've been doing it for years. And not only do they use country codes as their front doors for many of their stores, they actually append a country code to the logo as another way of visual clue. Because what they're trying to do is tell their customers in Australia and the UK to just go straight to that URL. Don't go to Amazon.com and then navigate away. Go to the localized website because you'll have a better experience.
You'll be shopping as locally country wise versus trying to get it from the us website.
[00:14:11] Speaker A: Thank you. And of course, I don't want to let everyone just, just listen to every single thing. They should also go read the article.
But you had some really good points about what does the future look like the next 20 years? And I think that's a really good thought in regards to what we as global companies should be thinking about when we think about how we engage with our audiences and those that follow us. And multilingual, as an example, has 110 countries represented in its audience and it's incredible. We asked them if they would like the magazine in their own language and over 70% said no.
Keep it in English. Very interesting.
That's what the bit that I was mentioning was counterintuitive. So we'll keep asking this question and see what happens? Because it's a very, very interesting response.
So what should we be thinking about as global companies, and probably multilingual is a different case. But what should companies be thinking about the next 20 years?
[00:15:24] Speaker B: Well, I think they're going to be thinking about AI. Obviously, everyone's talking about it and thinking about it. And of course, in this industry, we, many companies were early adopters through machine translation, which is now called less machine translation, and I think it's called language generation or on demand translation.
I don't see that going away and I actually see significant upsides to that. And I think the AI hype has been really good for this industry because it's opened a lot of eyes and a lot of purse strings to investing in AI, which will include language and will allow companies to begin testing machine translation from a self serve model, which I think is really, really important because customers are terribly underserved. The b two B audience, and I think that's probably going to be a lot of the multilingual audiences, tends to be more b two b. But if you look at the b two C audience, the demand for language, from what everything I've seen is still pretty high and they're underserved. According to the report card in which I look at the language as supported by the leading global brands, the average is around 34 languages, which is really not that many languages when you think of the demand, and I noted in the article, Wikipedia is over 300 languages and this is user generated, user created content, and that's one benchmark of demand and it's just one of many. But if you were to compare that 300 languages to the average of 34, how do you bridge the gap? Well, I pointed out Google translated over 100 languages, and that is one tool among many that users are using is to self translate content for themselves. And of course, Google Translate is arguably the most popular translation tool on the planet currently. And my understanding is they're working to double, triple that number of languages in the years ahead using AI as well.
Language growth is inevitable, and it's important, it's critically important because customers, people around the world are still dramatically underserved by the Internet. And I would like to see that change. And I think AI is going to help.
But we shouldn't lose sight of the overall holistic user experience because AI is just one part of that. Language is just one part of it. I talk about global templates. I talk about something I don't talk about in the article, is scenario based localization, which is talking really focusing on an end to end user experience.
That's something that companies need to focus on as they develop their localization strategy.
There's a lot happening. I'm actually very optimistic about the years ahead because AI, even though it has got a lot of challenges and it is far from perfect, it at least gets companies engaged and testing the waters. And because the language growth has been relatively slow over the past few years, and I'd like to see that accelerate and quickly.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I think I'm also optimistic. I think that there'll be significantly less players, but they'll agglomerate. I mean, time will agglomerate into variants of what we have right now. And I think that's really exciting.
A few different ideas. I'll share them with you later. But why? And this is to no detriment to companies that don't evolve over time, but, you know, these best practices, and we talked about the companies that didn't stand the passage of time. So why some of these companies, and let's call them old, have not been able to decipher proper global localization and having a global presence. And you see them struggling. Like you're saying, they just have one website and then they are supposed to be global, but they just, it's just very painful to do anything in, like, any other than non, their original, like, nation.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: Well, you know, globalization is expensive.
It's not easy, and it's scary.
There is no global marketing executive that I'm aware of who speaks all of the world's languages. So we have to place a lot of faith in our partners, our language providers. And that can be a little scary because a lot of executives at a very high level, they look at globalization as fraught with risks, geopolitical, public relations risks. If you mistranslate something, if you're not consistent, there's a lot of fear and uncertainty in going global. And I think that definitely keeps a lot of companies resistant. So they will localize as a last resort. Many of them will. I've called out Apple because I think they still punch well below their weight from a language perspective. And I would say Apple has just been really lucky that they've now, well, they've worked hard and they've created great products, but the products themselves have been so popular globally that in a sense, Apple hasn't had to work very hard to localize.
They have thankfully started to do a lot better as of late. And I actually think a lot more is coming. But sometimes the product is just successful on its own and you don't have to necessarily too much from a marketing perspective.
So there's a lot of factors involved, but I think. And then there's also old legacy brands that are highly decentralized. I did note automotive brands can have challenges from a global consistency perspective because they're highly decentralized companies with local offices that have their own p and ls. They do their own things, manage their own website. So from a best practice perspective, I think some of the legacy automakers are still working through some of these best practices, but they still support a lot of languages, a Toyota or Honda. They're still at over 40 languages. I think actually closer to 50. Both of them are. But from a perspective of other best practices, like global consistency, there's a lot of room for growth.
[00:22:27] Speaker A: And who should we follow?
Who is standing, who would you bet on for the next 20 years? Who would you bet on will be in your article in 20 years?
[00:22:41] Speaker B: Gosh, that's a great question. I don't. That is, I suspect. I suspect it's not a company that I'm aware of today. I do. That will be the best. Google was, like I said, Google was 20 years ago. Google washing brand is a shiny new search engine and Yahoo was the dominant search engine 20 years ago.
Yahoo actually was considered a very global company at the time, but Google came along and Google being a child of Unicode and was effectively a born global app, was able to go global more quickly than a Yahoo, which was much more, was using legacy technologies.
So if we look ahead, yeah, I could see something that's really.
That is based on AI as heavily built on AI.
But also I also think there's opportunities at the local level. I think a lot of companies underestimate the local level, meaning local content creators. There's still a lot of opportunity there. I could see a company that's born global but has a really strong partner network globally that allows them. They have partners, content creators in 100 plus countries.
So we'll see. Could that be a YouTube, could it be Spotify, maybe? I don't know.
That's a great question. I have to think on that and get back to you because I don't know who's going to be the leader. Google's having some legal challenges right now, so who knows? Google. There might be multiple Googles a few years from now, which could actually be a good thing if it might free them up to be more innovative in the future. But I think any company that understands and truly appreciates customers, and I shouldn't say to just people, obviously these companies are in the business of selling something. So they're customers to these companies, but ultimately they're people. And language is one thing I've said a lot is the Internet connects computers, but language connects people. And when you invest in language, you are investing in people and you're showing respect. And it's just, this is not news to you, Eddie, and to multilingual.
And I think any organization or company that has that mindset is going to do really, really well on the next 20 years.
[00:25:21] Speaker A: Fantastic. And what's going to be your next article about? Have you been thinking about it? How did the process go with this one?
[00:25:30] Speaker B: It's great. I love doing it. I have lots more to say, so, yeah, I will expect another submission shortly.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: John, where can we find you?
[00:25:40] Speaker B: Where can we find more about you can find the company is bytelevel.com, comma. That's bytelevel.com. and I also write a
[email protected], dot.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: And this was our conversation with John Younger. He is the co founder of Bilevel Research and has authored over 20 annual editions of the Glob Globalization Report card. My name is Eddie Arieta, CEO here at multilingual media. Thanks for listening.
