Not so fast. If your company is one of those organizations seeking to globalize and expand themselves with the help of cyberspace, you’ll soon realize that there are obstacles and obstructions on your path to international success—namely, the language and cultural barriers of each and every last market or region you try to penetrate. The knee-jerk reaction that many of these companies have for such a problem is to provide multilingual support for their customers.

Solutions to the Multilingual Market Dilemma

• Multilingual Support Centers: In truth, this is quite an effective way to solve the above mentioned impediment: establishing support centers in various locations filled with native speakers of different languages. You’ll be able to pass the hurdles of translation gaffes and cultural boundaries simply by using the resources of the market you’re trying to penetrate to help you with your translation work.
  However, this method tends to be so cripplingly expensive that only would-be multinational enterprises can avail of it. Small companies who depend mostly on Internet access to garner an international audience will not be able to afford setting up multilingual support centers; that’s simply out of the question.
• Multilingual Email Support: For smaller or startup corporations, they’ll just have to settle with the next best thing to multilingual support centers: multilingual email support. Either that or they have no choice but to limit support to English-speaking customers only and hope that one day their company will grow large or successful enough to get better options.
  • Machine Translation: Machine translation a la Google Translate or Yahoo Babel Fish is also a viable option for a largely English-speaking business that clamors for a worldwide Internet audience. Unfortunately, the problem with most machine translation tools is that they tend to make your work look worse than better.
    Until the time when these programs become advanced enough to understand normal human conversation the way normal humans do, they won’t be able to produce satisfactory results. In that regard, human translation is infinitely better than its machine counterpart.
  • Translation Services: Companies can also opt to use professional translation services to translate all incoming emails, have the support team answer them in English, then have the translation service translate the reply back to the language native to their customers. However, this approach is quite time consuming and expensive, especially for emails that tend to go back and forth.
  • Transbox: OneHourTranslation.com addresses the pitfalls of the translation services approach. It is the fastest human translation service available in the market today. It developed a product named Transbox that allows incredibly fast and intuitive translation for international customer support in their native language.
    The example featured on the One Hour Translation site shows a rough idea of how their translation service works. First off, once your company’s support inbox receives a help message in Spanish, all you need to do is send the email to Spanish2English@OneHourTranslation.com. From there, the text gets translated and sent back to you.
    Afterwards, you’ll get to answer the email in English and send it to English2Spanish@OneHourTranslation.com. You’ll either get your answer translated to Spanish and sent back to you or have it sent directly to the customer himself.
    It’s the kind of service that provides an efficient solution for answering non-English support requests in the customer’s vernacular that’s similar to what you’d normally find in an expensive company support center.

In conclusion, the choices you have for providing multilingual support depend on the financial circumstances and size of your company. If you’re a multinational company who could afford getting multilingual support centers for your customers, then by all means, avail of that method. You’ll get to have full control of the quality and volume of your translation department, there’s no lag time in between replies to messages, and your native-speaking workers won’t be committing any cultural gaffes and faux pas that could reflect negatively on your company.

If you’re a small business looking for a more affordable way to have your support email translated, then Transbox or similar Internet-based solutions may be the answer. Either way, avoid using machine translation for International customer support if you want to retain your customers.

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One Hour Translation is the world’s fastest professional human translation service. One Hour Translation provides Fast, High Quality Professional Translation on a 24/7 basis thanks to a community of over 8000 certified translators from all over the world.