Everybody knows the importance of speaking to their customers in the right way. Walk into a shop in London and you wouldn’t expect the sales assistant to start talking to you in French. Similarly, if you walked into a shop in London and the sales assistant began talking to you in broken English full of grammatical errors, you might have questions about their service.

The internet is changing rapidly, and changing our world rapidly, but the essence of good customer service remains the same. Communicate well with someone in their language if you want to do business. Which is why website translation services have their work cut out to ensure businesses like yours are talking the way your customers want to be spoken to. But as the needs change and the world moves on, what does the future hold?

China

Without a doubt, Chinese markets are of increasing importance and relevance to businesses and more and more people will be considering website translation services for a Chinese audience. With well over 1.2 billion Chinese readers, this is a highly competitive environment and your SEO will need to be good, and your content very relevant and engaging, if you want to achieve stand out.

Cloud solutions

Crowd or cloud sourcing is an increasingly talked about solution for everything from film funding to political policy generation, but can it work for translation? Many companies think ‘people power’ can be harnessed to increase quality and decrease cost, but the chances are it depends on the highly developed infrastructure of a translation services company to counterbalance the highly unpredictable nature of crowd-sourcing in general. This could be one for the distant future, but not the here and now needs of the average business.

Changing technologies

Many companies already use a blend of computerised website translation services with human labour, and many think humans will be phased out eventually. Intuition remains the vital ingredient though, if something doesn’t ‘feel’ right to someone, they can discuss this with a human translator and intuitively determine the correct amends. As long as the content is being read by humans, those subtleties of the amend process are likely to keep them in the translation services loop for the future.

Markets in the making

Some countries, like Bangladesh, are poor now but in the future will have incredible power from the size of their populations. Mobile technologies spread like wildfire when the conditions are right, and those markets – and languages – are likely to become highly influential for website translation services one day. It’s not a question of if, but when. And, of course, who? Who will make the most of the translation services required by businesses when that happens?