International Online Marketing

Despite the snowy conditions and being woken by Leicestershire's earthquake in the night, I was pleased to get to the e business club's session on International Online Marketing early this morning in Nottingham.  The speaker, Mike Hunter from www.betterlanguages.com was excellent and made some really useful observations about search engine optimisation for websites targeting overseas markets and about translation procurement.  There was a real distinction discussed between UK based websites with foreign languages incorporated and those domains registered and hosted in the target country.

During the last seven years, working with client World Market Center Las Vegas, I have learnt an enormous amount about use of language, translation sourcing and best practice and copywriting for foreign markets and it's something I'd like to make more use of across different marketplaces.  I have always loved languages, was bilingual English and Welsh from the age of four and quickly adopted French and then Russian at senior school where I also studied Latin for a few years.  Unfortunately, my Russian has deteriorated the fastest because I simply don't use it enough and would probably have to start from scratch if I ever needed it for work.  Since then a smattering of Italian has seen me through a few wonderful holidays plus some really exciting work projects and my children have reminded me of what little German and Spanish I remember as they seek my advice on homework.  The world wide web has certainly made the world seem so much smaller - next language on the agenda for me is Portuguese with potential projects on the horizon in Brazil.