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Thursday, September 6, 2007

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Why Translating Your Website in Hindi Makes Better Sense
Why Translating Your Website in Hindi Makes Better Sense
Did you know that in 2002, an estimated 32% of Internet users were non-English speakers? With the phenomenal growth of computer usage and the spread of the net fever, especially in the third world countries, the figure would have multiplied manifold in the past 4 years.
In fact, the Internet is fast becoming the basic and fundamental source and dissemination of information, purchases of goods and services worldwide. In addition, those computer and Internet users are increasingly from non-English speaking countries. This figure is constantly rising. In response, businesses have quickly become aware of the benefits of making their websites relevant to the native languages of the target audience.
Marketing is all about speaking the customers' language
There is no denying that the rest of the world outside of English-speaking countries is coming online faster than never before. What is the state of affairs, and how does that impact businesses worldwide? How serious is the impact of everyone "going global"? And, more importantly, what needs to be done with our Websites to fully take advantage of this wave of non-English-speaking people coming online?
Whether or not a person speaks English has really nothing to do with the responsibility of a Website to communicate in the language of the target markets. Indians read English just fine, and yet they feel comfortable to surf in their own language. They live their life in their own language, not in English. If you want to attract their attention, your site has to go where they are, and speak to them in their own language.

Outside the seven countries where English is native, and India too, there is no form of marketing in any country that happens in English. If someone doesn't believe this, they should visit Europe, Asia or South America. People live their life in their own language, and your marketing better follow, whether the media is newspaper/magazine ads/articles, radio/TV, billboards... or Websites.
Enter Website Translation
Translating a Website is a viable answer because you then make an existing website accessible, usable and culturally suitable to your specific target audience. This requires both programming expertise and linguistic/cultural knowledge.
In the majority of cases it is the lack of linguistic and cultural input that lets a website localization project down. In order to give an insight into the impact culture has on website localization the following examples depict areas in which a solid understanding of the target culture is necessary.
Some very good reasons to translate your website into Hindi
• One of the official languages of India, with a population of over 1 billion. Hindi has 366 million first-language speakers; additional 121 million second-language speakers. Spoken throughout northern India: Delhi; Uttar Pradesh; Rajasthan; Punjab; Madhya Pradesh; northern Bihar; Himachal Pradesh.
• Hindi is also spoken in Bangladesh, Belize, Botswana, Germany, Kenya, Nepal, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, UAE, United Kingdom, USA, Yemen, and Zambia.
• With the growing numbers of Indans buying PC's and Internet access available from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, English speakers will soon be in the minority when it comes to Internet use.
• Results of research carried out by Nielsen-Net ratings in March 2005 described foreign internet markets as "low hanging fruit," i.e. if you have the will and foresight there are massive revenues to be found for relatively little effort.
• As Kaizad Gotla, senior analyst at Nielsen-Netratings states, "The easiest opportunities are in countries where Internet usage patterns and user/site relationships are less established. Acquiring users in markets that are currently in their growth stages will lead to a loyal user base that will pay dividends for Internet companies in the future."
• The ability to communicate to a whole new audience in their own language will undoubtedly yield results not only in a financial sense (cost efficiency) but also in terms of marketing and creating awareness of your brand, service or product.
• For non-English speaking users looking for your product or service, you automatically capture their attention.
• A Hindi website shows you are thinking about the customer. That little extra effort shows you have thought and cared enough about them to offer the website in their language.
• For many cultures, more so in India, there is an issue of trust when it comes to buying over the Internet, especially if they feel it is in a language they are not fully proficient in. Offering them a language alternative allows the customers to feel secure
• Search engines lead people to your site. In countries such as China, Japan and France, Google, Yahoo and MSN are not the default search engines. Homegrown search engines are emerging and they are proving successful because they work in native languages and are focused on the habits and needs of their users. In addition, many of the key search engines, especially Google, are developing the capacity to run searches in Hindi. Having pages of your site available in Hindi ensures maximum potential for your site being picked up in searches.
Making a website in Hindi or translating the existing website does not complete the task. There are a lot of important, cultural, ethnic issues which form an essential part of the contents of the website in Hindi. Some examples, which need to be decided upon, in greater details, are mentioned below:
• Images and pictures – as they carry subtle cultural intonations in them.
• Symbols - as with pictures, symbols can cause problems. Icons using fingers such as an OK sign or V-sign may mean different things to different cultures. Western symbols do not always mean the same abroad.
• Colors – they are also loaded with cultural meanings.
• Ease of navigation - Access to certain pages is also a factor that can be considered as relevant.
Culture affects everything we do, say, read, hear and think and even websites cannot escape the influence of culture.
The impact of culture on the translation of a website is huge. The above few examples are literally the tip of the iceberg.
Ostom loves languages and has 20 years experience of translation. He provides consultancy to businesses on translation, linguistic brand analysis and other language relates services. Ostom also writes on travel and patent related issues.
Contact http://www.indianscripts.com/service.html for website translation from English into Hindi.


Adsense Good or Bad?
I have often pondered this question?
Here are my own basic thoughts on the complex subject.
Most websites I visit have some kind of adsense system running; I would estimate that some of these are making good money from the Google system. Certainly sites with over 1000 visitors per day should receive a small amount of revenue.
Generally I believe the adsense system is a good one, however like most things these days the adsense system has been misused by individuals who fully understand how search engines work; unfortunately these people have already made their money. These people have used many tactics in the past to raise their sites page ranking, thus ensuring more visitors, more visitors means more revenue from the system. These sites are generally kept open for a few months and then closed down, with the next one instantly opened up. This practice has been going on for years. The sites are even sold daily on EBay; I would imagine they are just about to be banned.
What normally happens when a few people misuse a system is it leads to others suffering, and in this case it has happened. Google is sandboxing new sites for longer. Saying this company had to act, they have now introduced the 'Big Daddy' update. This update has affected sites that have large numbers of irrelevant links or millions of irrelevant web pages. Unfortunately it has also affected the ranking of genuine businesses; hopefully this is just a temporary blip. My own opinion is the internet should be a level playing field for everyone; however I somehow doubt it ever will be.
I believe there is a place for adsense on most sites as long as it is discrete, well set up and does not look out of place, (fonts, colours etc), The main thing to think about is what do you want from your visitors. Most sites offer a product to potential customers. This causes the dilemma of balancing potential revenue from adsense against losing a potential customer, what I mean by this is, a visitor may be interested in your site, however you could lose them instantly to Google. This is why in my opinion is if your site has a product you are selling, you should never employ adsense on your homepage.
In conclusion I like the system, it is easy to set up and user friendly. I hope Google manage to filter out the unethical element who in the end will only spoil things for everyone.
About the author - Peter Arkwright recently retired from the military, he is now the Managing Director of http://www.bizseller4u.com
A new portal that allows people to list their Business for Sale
This article is free for republishing

About the author - Peter Arkwright recently retired from the military, he is now the Managing Director of http://www.bizseller4u.com
A new portal that allows people to list their Business for Sale


Automated Website Testing
You just finished building your company's website. You have tested it yourself and had other company employees test it. The website now goes live. A few weeks later you start getting emails from irate customers who complain that they are unable to place their orders because certain steps in the "Buy Now" process give errors. You quickly fix the problem. A few days later you get complaints about some other issue and you again react quickly to fix the website. This continues for a few months till the complaints finally halt and things stabilize. At this point you make some enhancements to your website. A few days later a customer email alerts you to the fact that in the process of making this enhancement you "broke" something else on the website. Again you spend time to find and fix the problem but by now you are perplexed and not a little frustrated. These issues have cost you many customers in the last few months and potentially spread ill will across the broader customer community. It seems to you that the only way to have detected these issues before they went "live" was to have employed a large army of software testers, something your company is unable to afford.
Enter automated software testing. While nothing can replace good human testers, broad test coverage requires some degree of software automation for it to be economically feasible. Automated testing tools can provide a huge workforce multiplier and do a very good job complimenting human testers. Every change to your website no matter how small requires thorough testing to ensure that nothing else was affected. This becomes very time consuming very quickly due to the large number of possible cases to test. A strategy whereby tests are automated using software becomes an economic necessity.
There are two classes of automated testing tools. The first kind, functional and regression testing tools, helps to make sure that the website behaves as it should: for example if a customer clicks on button X, page Y is displayed without errors. Functional and regression testing tools are able to automate a large number of scenarios to ensure that your website works as intended. The second type, load testing tools gauge how well your website performs when subjected to a large stress, such as a large number of simultaneous users. I will be discussing load testing in a separate article.
I will now give you an overview of the basic characteristics of functional testing. Before you can begin any kind of functional test automation you will need to identify the test scenarios you wish to automate. Once this is done, you will need to generate test scripts that cover these scenarios.
A functional testing tool will typically record user interactions with a website. As you perform various operations on your website or application, the tool records every step. When you finish recording, it generates an automated script from your interactions with your website. Alternatively you could use the tool to construct the script by hand. Typically testers tend to do a combination of the two. They will use the recorder to generate the basic framework of their scripts and then tweak the scripts by hand to incorporate special cases.
Scripts can be graphical and/or text based in nature. A good functional testing tool does not require users to have a programming background. Users not proficient in programming will work predominantly with graphical scripts. In most tools graphical scripts will typically show all interactions in a tree structure and users can edit any node of the tree to modify the script. Some users however, who have programming backgrounds may wish to program their scripts. These users will typically work with a text script written in a standard language such as JavaScript or VBScript.
Once you have generated your script you will need to insert checks in your scripts to test if your website is functioning correctly. Such checks are usually called checkpoints. A checkpoint verifies that values of a property obtained when testing the website match expected values. Checkpoints enable you to set the criteria for comparing expected values with obtained values. The expected value of a property is derived from recording interactions with the web site. It is viewed and modified from checkpoints. The current value is retrieved during replay (i.e. during the execution of the test case).
There are many different kinds of checkpoints. A page checkpoint verifies the source of a page or frame as well as its statistical properties. You can check for broken links, verify link URLs, image sources, the hierarchy of HTML tags or even the entire HTML source of the Web page or frame. You can also set thresholds for the loading time of a page. A text checkpoint verifies that a given text is displayed or is not displayed in a specified area on a web page. A web object checkpoint verifies the properties of a web object e.g. the value of an HTML INPUT field. A database checkpoint verifies the contents of a database used by your website.
When you replay a test script, the testing tool will open the recorded application and perform the recorded steps in the same sequence they were specified in the script. As it replays the script it will also run through all the checkpoints you have inserted into the script. In addition, you can test your application's behavior with varying data inputs. For example you can try to submit a page after entering different values in the edit box of a web page. At the end of the replay a detailed report is typically be generated.
Functional test automation allows you to automate the repetitive testing of a large number of scenarios across your website. Functional testing tools are an important weapon in your development arsenal whose use provides a huge productivity gain and allows for small testing groups to accomplish significantly more work. There is a very strong economic case for the use of Functional Testing Tools as part of the development and deployment cycle of a website.

About the Author:
Umair Khan is Founder and Chairman of
Verisium, Inc., a provider of products for automated functional and regression testing, load testing, bug tracking and test and requirement management.
Verisium is the maker of vTest, an automated functional and regression testing tool for web applications.