Do you feel lost about how to begin to get international clients?
Getting started can seem daunting. You may feel that you are opening the door to never ending costs in translation, and all sorts of communication problems with foreigners.
Rather than feel overwhelmed, why not start tinkering with a tool you probably have right in front of you? You know Google, right? Well if you go the Google home page, look up at the URL line and just replace the ‘www’ with ‘translate’ and press enter or go. You will land on Google’s free translation page.
Now what can you do here?
Well, why don’t you start playing around with translations? Instead of translating texts from the language you are familiar with into something you don’t understand and seeing how funny everything looks, find some text in a foreign language and translate it into English. Evaluate the quality. Be critical. Analyze how you can use this tool.
Can’t find any foreign text?
Well, open up another window in Google if you want. Go to the Advanced Search page. Type in a couple of keywords you are familiar with, for you company for example, or whatever interests you. But be sure to limit the results to one foreign country and choose the appropriate language.
- Don’t worry if you don’t understand anything.
- Go look at the websites that came up.
- Find one that looks interesting to you.
- Find a good chunk of text.
- Translate the text with the Google translation tool.
- Look at how much you can easily understand.
- Notice where the translation glitches.
After a few tests, targeting subjects you are familiar with, evaluate the translation for how useful it can be for you to use in the steps you need to take for your international business expansion
You can learn a lot by playing around like this. With a little practice you can get a very good feel of what is being said in any particular industry. Most online readers are skimmers anyway. If you look through more than one foreign article on the same subject you should be able to get past most translation glitches.
Pretty soon you will be identifying one specific country and checking out the market there for your industry, your products. You can find your foreign competitors. You will see what your foreign target market is talking about. You will notice how it is different to your local market.
How will this help you get international clients?
Well before you know it you will be able to structure your foreign market research. Sure this is only online research and you should try to do a little phone research as well. If you take the approach of targeting one market at a time for a specific product of yours you will learn how to do this first step in international marketing.
The hardest part is to begin. The steepest learning curve is right at the beginning. This is where the free online translation tools can play a significant role in getting international clients for your business, simply by getting you started.
