Today, many companies use online communities to facilitate conversations amongst their customers. Why? Well, the benefits are pretty substantial. Guests in these online forums support each other with information on how to use the companies’ products and offer solutions to common problems. 

As you can imagine, this brings with it a wealth of information not only for customers but your company, too. Just think of all the information you can gain to improve your products and overall business strategy.

But here’s the kicker. A majority of these online communities only support one language—usually English.

If your company follows suit, this limits you in so many ways.

How can you get around this, and how can you allow global users to interact with each other (in their preferred languages)? Why is this topic all the rage in global business? Let’s get chatting.

Social in any language: Why multilingual community support matters

It’s quite simple. If your global organization has online communities that only support English, you’re leaving out a big portion of your customers. It limits participation in the group, which means less engagement and feedback from your target audiences.

Sure, you can argue that you can have separate forums for each language, but that gets to be a lot to manage. Not to mention, it doesn’t allow all your users to share ideas as one community, (which may mean many less-engaged online communities instead of one large, active one.)

One multilingual community means you can get the feedback you need while possibly lowering your support costs because your audience provides product support for you.

Exploring your options

For this type of content, it doesn’t make sense to use traditional means to translate the conversations going back and forth in these forums. On top of being costly, it would be time-consuming—and delayed conversations would go against the whole point of having multilingual online communities.

To do it correctly, you need real-time translation.

You can use some of the free online machine translation tools available to you. In this case, users click a button and they get the information translated for them in an instant. Sounds great, right?

While it can work, there are some limitations with this technology.

First, free forms of machine translation give you real-time translation, but that translation output is often sounds clunky. The nature of this type of copy (found in website forums, social media, etc.) is dynamic and very casual. For example, users may use acronyms like LOL and SMH (laugh out loud and shaking my head, for those of you who laugh out loud and shake your head at those darn chat lingo acronyms). Users also pay less attention to spelling and grammar. All these factors limit this type of machine translation’s ability to produce quality results to promote engagement.

Second, free machine translation tools are public engines, so your data isn’t necessarily secure.

Quality translations, quality conversations

There is an alternative. Typically, language service providers, like Sajan, have social media foundation engines that understand this dynamic content. Sajan can then pair these with as many compatible languages as you wish. Users can still view all conversations in their preferred language, but the machine translation quality is better.

The more content that feeds through these engines, the better the translations will get over time. Higher quality translations equal higher quality conversations—and less head scratching and pondering amongst your global users in multilingual online communities.

In this case, your data is also private and highly secure.

This option gives you real-time machine translation paired with quality, cost savings, security and a free latte. Wait . . . maybe not that last one.

Multilingual online communities are a blazing-hot topic in global business today.

(B2C)