Book Review: Beyond Borders - Web Globalization Strategies

Book Review: �Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies� by John Yunker, New Riders Publishers, 2003 (ISBN 0-7357-1208-5)

Today, organizations of all sizes are reaching out across geographic borders in an attempt to target new customers in an increasingly competitive global marketplace. Products and services are being translated into myriad languages, localized for the country of origin, and personalized to match the individual preferences of the end-user.

While the potential return on investment may indeed be worth the effort, globalization and personalization come with substantial cost. To ensure you�re heading down the right path (and that you avoid the expensive mistakes of the trailblazers before you), it�s best to have a roadmap.

The World Wide Web allows us to reach beyond geographic borders in an attempt to access untapped global markets. But reaching for an audience, and actually communicating with them in meaningful ways, involves much more than translating content into different languages.

In �Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies�, John Yunker explores the globalization landscape and the role Web-based content plays when we attempt to reach beyond our native marketplaces. He also touches on the strategies involved in preparing for a globalization project, strategizing ways to effectively design, develop and manage global content for the web and beyond. Issues beyond the web include: telephone support, email support, payment services, marketing, customer relationship management, and training, with real world examples provided, where appropriate.

Yunker explores a variety of case studies and interviews with the leaders of several organizations that globalize and localize the content they create for multiple audiences. Organizations interviewed in the book include: L.L. Bean, Burton Snowboards, FedEx, Monster.com, FIFA World Cup, among others.

�Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies� is an easy to read volume, packed with useful information. It contains a wonderful section of appendices that contains a glossary of terms (to help demystify the jargon), language and country codes (to help display content in both the correct language and in the context of the country targeted), text encoding tables (to ensure content is displayed correctly using the character set of the target language), international notation symbols (to ensure numbers, units of measure, currencies, times, and dates are formatted and displayed properly), and character entities (to allow for the display of non-ASCII characters such as symbols, smart quotes, accents, superscript and subscript).

To help you get started, the folks at New Riders Pubishing have provide a free, downloadable chapter from the book entitled, “Internationalization and Localization”. Download your free copy. (PDF)

�Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies� is a must read for anyone serious about saving time and money globalizing and localizing content. Do it right the first time. Get your copy today!

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