The challenge, one of Capita’s largest fundraising events, will take place at Broughton House near Kettering.  It is an adventure race day where teams of four from all Capita Businesses gather, to compete for the Capita Challenge Trophy and raise money for their charity partner, Cancer Research UK.

The members of Capita-TI’s team are:

-          Natalie Waddington, Executive Personal Assistant to the Chief Executive Officer

-          Stewart Crabb, Account Manager

-          Michael Gurney, Business Development Manager

-          Sam Greenwood, Project Manager

The challenge involves a variety of mental and physical activities including nine physical events, nine mental challenges, orienteering, kayaking, and using brain power, teamwork and a lot of determination. Natalie Waddington said ‘’I wanted Capita-TI to enter the event as I felt it would be an excellent opportunity to meet colleagues from other areas of the company’’.

Over the last five weeks, various fundraising events to support the challenge have taken place including:

-          Dress Down Fridays

-          A Bake Off

• 1^st place, Jenni Weech, Account Manager for her White Chocolate Cake Loaves
• 2^nd place, Charlie Brooks, Customer Service Representative for her Ugly Victoria Sponge
• 3^rd place, Karin Lambert, wife of Terry Lambert, Executive Account Manager for her Swedish Margareta Tårta

-          Raffle

• 1^st prize, £50.00 donated by the Old Bell public house
• 2^nd prize, £30.00 donated by Fresca Italian Restaurant
• 3^rd prize, Afternoon Tea for two donated by the Saddleworth Hotel

To date, Capita-TI has raised £1,000.00 and colleagues of the Capita-TI Team wish them every success for Saturday!

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?

Baidu, the Chinese language search engine, was established in 2000 and now provides an index of over 740million web pages. Although Baidu is the clear winner in China’s search engine war, Google has held on to the number two spot. But this doesn’t mean it has been plain sailing for the U.S service; in fact, Google has been blighted with issues regarding censorship in the communist country for several years.

Because of the grip Google has on search engine marketing, Baidu remains relatively unknown outside of China. However, if your company operates globally, and a significant proportion of your custom comes from China, you’d be a fool not to take note of this service. Optimising your website for Baidu will help you to tap into a huge market and could potentially be a turning point for your business.  Here are three steps to optimising for the Chinese market.

Content is king

In many ways, Baidu’s algorithm is considered less sophisticated than those of the Big Three and has actually been compared to search engines as they were several years ago. But, in the same way that Google has made a shift to place more weight on high quality content, so too does Baidu. To get in its good books, you’re going to need reams and reams of Chinese content, even if Chinese isn’t the official language of your site. But before you get the Chinese copywriter cavalry in, it’s important to know that there are official guidelines you must follow over what is acceptable in China. Break the rules and you could find you fall out with Baidu…

Choose the correct keyphrases

Another similarity between Google and Baidu is that keyphrases remain pivotal to your search engine marketing campaign. Keyphrases are just as important to encourage good rankings but the process is slightly more difficult given that you are now working with Chinese keyphrases. When looking for a professional translation service, bear in mind that Pinyin is the preferred dialect for Baidu.

Don’t duplicate

The ‘no duplication’ rule is nothing new, and is something you should be used to from your English SEM efforts. Not heeding this guideline could land you in trouble with most search engines, but fail to provide unique content for Baidu and you’ll soon see that they’re far less lenient over this policy than their English counterparts. You can safety check your content by using robots.txt to instruct indexing.

Lots of free online services offer literal translation for your website, but copying and pasting your content won’t give you a truly localised feel for the foreign markets you want to tap into.

For a start, it may be full of errors. Secondly, unless it’s had a translator’s intuitive feel and been keyword checked for multilingual SEO it will probably not read very well to a native speaker. Professional translation services can give your website the edge, when it comes to all important first impressions and converting sales in new markets. Cultural factors can be as important as grammatical ones, especially if key search words differ from your existing markets, and the opportunities offered by multilingual text have never been greater.  If a customer from the USA was searching for a holiday they would use the word “vacation” whereas an UK customer would use the word “holiday” and subtle changes like these also effect search terms and website content in non-English speaking countries as well.

Capita translation services have created this infographic to highlight some of the facts you might not know about how the world is reading – and spending – online.  Capita will also be attending and is a premium sponsor of the Localization World Conference in London 12^th-14^th June 2013.

Take a look at the infographic to see how many facts you’re aware of, and whether your business is as ready for the future as you think.

Lots of people offer translation services, but individuals and ‘instant translation’ websites can do more harm than good. True website localisation means local knowledge of web practice as well as just language, and if you make mistakes in your translation you can offend your audience very quickly. Worst of all, if you don’t speak the language, how would you even know?

What does a website localisation translator provide?

Good translation services will be able to offer you a one-stop shop with cost effective access to a very wide range of languages. They will have the experience to make the whole process easy and affordable.

When is the right time to ‘go global’ with my site?

That depends on your business plan. You may just want to be more visible to Asian markets, or you may be specifically targeting customers near your new French office. Either way, a good translation services provider will be able to discuss the best way to reach those people. How ‘local’ your website localisation becomes depends on your needs, so an upfront consultation can save you a lot of time in the long run.

Do I really need to bother? My audience speak English pretty well.

That all depends on how intimate a service you want to provide. Sometimes website localisation is essential in order to create an understanding of your business that just wouldn’t exist otherwise. But more often than not, localisation gives a level of intimacy and tailored service that is just as much about the reader’s impression of your effort and understanding. A company that goes to the trouble of speaking to you in your native tongue will come across as one that will go to the trouble of taking care of you in every other way too.

That said, full translation isn’t always necessary. A blend of languages may be the best solution to striking the right cultural tone, or just to keep the sentences short (many languages run long when typed compared to English). This can be especially important when looking at text other than long content. You may want to retain tabs and buttons in English, and finding the perfect balance is where a translation services provider can be invaluable.

How long does website localisation take?

How long is a piece of string! It all depends on the scope of your site and the availability of whoever provides your translation services. Once you’ve made the decision to go ahead with localisation it can be tempting to rush, especially if your competitors already have localised content for that market. But the devil is in the details, and to get it wrong could damage your reputation. Errors can be shared online in seconds, if you want your presence to endure, take your time to get everything right. Remember, you may be translating for a country, but you need to ensure every individual reader feels like your website is just for them.