FOCUS: MIXED SIGNALS: LOCALIZATION
The Language of the Web
The multinational Internet is becoming more multicultural as demand for local-language content is increasing rapidly
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By Chris Taylor/TAIPEI
Issue cover-dated December 7, 2000
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WHEN pAsia, a successful Taiwanese e-tailer and instant-messaging dotcom took its CoolBid reverse-auction operation to China last year, it did so with a $500,000 advertising campaign that featured a Soviet realist graphic of youths, arms outstretched, shouting in a pun on Maoist sloganeering: "In unity is strength, let's get together and cut prices." It's an advertising ploy that would probably go nowhere in Taiwan, but in China it was an instant hit. "You need different strategies for different markets," says Heidi Hsueh, pAsia's group executive vice-president. "When I'm in China, I try to think like them."
Such words, coming from a native speaker of Mandarin, fly in the face of executives who talk of the "Greater China market," but they also say a lot about how the World Wide Web is increasingly becoming less about the world and more about specific markets. Despite its global pretensions, for much of its infancy the Internet was very much an English-speaking, United States-dominated Web.
That's set to change. According to Forrester Research, by 2004 half of all on-line commerce will be happening somewhere other than the U.S. In other words, at the same time that the Internet is becoming truly more about the world, it's also becoming a babel of contending languages and a thicket of localized content.
In the Chinese world, the move started early, with Chinese entrepreneurs quickly emulating successful dotcom business models and modifying them for the Chinese market. Yahoo!, for example, has spawned a slew of Chinese-language lookalikes.
Some, like the much-hyped Tom.com in Hong Kong, seem little more than IPO blind alleys. But others, like Taiwan's Kimo.com and Yam.com, have successfully taken the portal formula and localized it to the point that copycats now need to provide more than a mere translation of content if they hope to compete in markets cornered by these first movers.
Even ICQ, the Israeli instant-messaging hit, has a Chinese equivalent, another pAsia offering that started out as Chinese ICQ, but is now known as 8D8D.com (it sounds like "buddy-buddy" in Mandarin). "Because the Internet is cultural and lifestyle oriented, it can't be dominated by the U.S.," says pAsia's Hsueh. "Local companies will always have an advantage over foreign companies."
The fragmentation of the Web is set to take another step forward now that it has become possible to register so-called top-level domain names (those that end in "com," "net," "org" or "gov" without requiring a country suffix) in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Hsueh, whose pAsia was recently qualified by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers as a registrar for Chinese domain names, says her company has long fought for the role, not simply because she thinks it will be popular but because for some it is essential.
"For companies with a strong Chinese brand name, it makes no sense to have an English domain name," she says, citing the example of Taiwan Pacific Cellular, the mobile operator that is known locally as Taiwan Dageda (literally "big brother big") in Mandarin.
Meanwhile, James Wang, an Internet analyst with Merrill Lynch Taipei, is quietly cautious. "Obviously your name as a company is worth a lot of money, but I don't see Pacific Cellular dropping their English name either," he says. He also points to the potential for confusion, noting the issue of the simplified characters used in China and Singapore versus the complex characters used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, which pAsia reports can only be registered as separate domain names.
"In other words," says Wang, "Sina.com will now have to have three domain names: English, complex characters and simplified characters." But such issues are unlikely to trouble Chinese users of the Internet, who can now log on and surf using URLs in their
own language.
In all likelihood, the localization of the Web culturally, geographically and linguistically is a trend that will continue unabated. "Content is basically locally driven. Even though we all speak Chinese, a sports site in Taiwan is going to cover basketball," says Wang. "In Hong Kong? Probably not."
And as Japan's i-mode, the world's first popular taste of the mobile Internet, has shown, consumers want timely, localized information: Where's the nearest Thai restaurant? Is there a sale on for diamond rings in the neighbourhood? It goes without saying that people will want to access and download the information in their own language.
Indeed, China has taken this convenience a step further, setting up its own semi-official body, China Internet Network Information Centre, as its sole authority to issue Chinese-character domain names--with Chinese-character equivalents of "com," "net" and "org." Calling it a "superior" system, officials from the centre were recently quoted in the Guangzhou Daily as saying that Chinese-character domain names were "a question of Chinese sovereignty."
Perhaps this is a battle that China can only win by opting out of the World Wide Web entirely and establishing its own China Wide Web. As Wang puts it, it is as if the Internet, which is by nature a global exchange, is going from big to small. But then another way of looking at is that the small are standing up and demanding their place.
"In future, I don't think English will be the dominant language on the Internet," says Hsueh. "Every language will have its place." But Wang says, "I think in the end, English will still be the language of choice. If your market is in Taiwan, you're going to do it all in Chinese, but if you're a B2B you're going to stick to English."
A babel of tongues with English as the tool of international commerce? It sounds as if the World Wide Web is becoming more like . . . well, the world.
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