Forum Moderators: open
Though you are looking for best English keyword,
I think most Japanese peopele don't watch English site,
and they don't use English keyword at SE.
Popular SE in Japan?
They use usually Yahoo Japan,Msn,Google,etc.
By the way,I use Google mostly.
Specific tool?
Most recently Google start Adwords select in Japan.
So many keyword are still cheap.
what product do your site sell?
advise for you,
make easy site of japanese for promotion in Japan
and SE optimaize about some japanese keyword.
[edited by: Woz at 11:36 am (utc) on Aug. 2, 2002]
[edit reason] TOS #14 [/edit]
create a colour coded document to send to the translators...then web set according to the colour code...when additions are made to the site always keep a record of the changes in the colour coded original...and it's fairly easy
SE promotion is hard work and it may well be worth hiring a local specialist if you can afford it...we can't so I just get headaches from going through Japanese SEs using online translators
It seems to me that compared to US or Europe you need time to get "clients". It is easy to get visitors, but the japanese clients need more attention, more exchange of emails. They seem more diffident than European or US users. You have to investigate your logs, carefully and in the long term: a contact that you got in January could be a client 5 months later.
Getting links is difficult too. With European or US sites you can get about 10 % of results (one link every 10 requests); in Japan 1 %!
We have Japanese staff, but compared to the English or German area you need a lot more efforts (ten times!)
Q. Why not to invest that efforts in the English or German market, that seem more profitable?
A. Because a Japanese client is an excellent client. A fidelity client, a long term client; a client that will recommend your services (word of the mouth).
> what product do your site sell?
The site is touristic-oriented.
> especially with Japanese where there are online translation tools...
Are they now good enough for e-mail? You can use on-line tools to translate and communicate? True, the basics will due, I guess, for the tourisme business.
Oh, another question : if I use the on-line translators, like babelfish, can I easily cut and paste to and from an e-mail prog like Outlook Express? Isn't OE going to choke on the different character sets? Does it have to be reconfigured every time to read/send messages in Japanese?
It sounds like it might we worth a try. If I go ahead, I'll dig this thread back up and let you all know what comes of it!
> especially with Japanese where there are online translation tools...Are they now good enough for e-mail? You can use on-line tools to translate and communicate?
web_india
I developed a japanese site quite sometime back in a similar fashion. The site was listed with search engines as well including lycos but no sales for the site - not a single sale. Apparently, I couldn't figure out how to make the japanese customers to buy.
Try looking at the advanced search page on Google using Bork Bork Bork [google.com] language and you can experience for yourself what these machine translations will render...This is meant to be a joke, but seriously, would you buy something from a site done entirely in gibberish where you could only make out a few words?
To reach any foreign language market you will need to have a human translated site. Free online tools cannot do this work for you.
louponne :
do let us know how your experience turns out to be
This thread has revived my interest in making that japanese site to work and am thinking of redesigning the site and do some more work on it to get some positive results.
Now to move further :
1. How to get in touch with japanese translators - I suppose some student from japan should be contacted. Are you aware of someone who can help me out with this japanese site ? If you have any emails or url's you can sticky me. Actually, I tried to locate on the web but the translation charges were too high beyond our budget.
2. Then the second part also is that since we don't know japanese then how to communicate with the customers queries and converting them to sales.
3. Also, what all payment options to consider from point of convenience of japanese customers
>1. How to get in touch with japanese translators - I suppose some student from japan should be contacted. Are you aware of someone who can help me out with this japanese site ? If you have any emails or url's you can sticky me. Actually, I tried to locate on the web but the translation charges were too high beyond our budget.
You really shouldn't "skimp" on a translation job. You get what you pay for. If you go with a cheapo student or non-native, your site will look unprofessional. The hard part is finding a freelancer or a small quality company in between the student and the very expensive big firms. But be careful - if you decide to spend the least possible, it will just be money thrown out the window, cuz the low quality of the translation will drive away prospects! You have to find the middle road.
bill :Honestly speaking web_india, your example confirms a belief I've had about foreign language sites all along...you have to go all the way with quality language translation and then native copywriters (if possible) to get a quality response. In this case, a bad translation is worse than none at all.
I agree that most of it had to do with poor translation but won't you think that at least we could have got at least an email inquiry even which didn't occur, though for our english language site, we have a lot of customers from japan who buy the products regularly.
Poorly translated material is only acceptable if your potential customer has used one of those free online tools to get a machine translation of your site because they are interested in your product or service. Then they know what to expect. If you put up gibberish Japanese, very few people will stick around on your site unless you have some very compelling content that everyone wants to see. As you have shown, you didn't even get an inquiry because you proved that you couldn't work in the target language. The Japanese have a much higher expectation of service than other cultures...so you need to instill confidence thru your site's language usage before you can expect anyone to respond.
On the other hand, you do have Japanese people coming thru your English site...maybe instead of trying to get a Japanese language site up you should be optimizing your English site for the Japanese. We've talked about this topic here before. There are things you can do to make your English site more appealing such as quoting prices in Yen, making use of very simple English without colloquialisms, and the like. There is a small percentage of the Japanese market that can work in English and you may have more success with them long-term.
the translation went out to a professional translator...we then had it checked by our centre in Osaka and by our sponsor's staff in Tokyo...the translation itself cost us a little under £300 for a 10 page site, corrections were included in the price
the translation is colour coded so that I can web set it myself...this is essential so that the site can easily be altered later...and so that I don't have to mess around with second rate auto-generated mark up
submission to search engines has been hard work...there are a limited number of online translation tools for Japanese...some time as saved by having a couple of Japanese exchange students drop into the office and find me the main submit URL pages for the big Japanese SEs...but I've managed a fair number of submissions myself, and succeeded in some link chasing
commercially I'd hire somebody local to do SEO in Japan for the start up...as a charity we can't afford that though
email enquiries in Japanese have been rare...mostly they get fed straight through to our Tokyo or Osaka centres after a skim through with an online translator
in general one should send email in a language one writes fluently and rely on the recipient to translate...otherwise you end up with a bad translation of an incoherent original
I agree too that paying less doesn't give high quality. But what I was considering is that getting the translation done from some one local and to do the designing part myself so that I can save some costs or do you think that even the designing part should be outsourced to someone local?
I think you haven't gone thru the reply I posted to your question earlier regarding encoding. :)
Pl have a look at it here
[webmasterworld.com...]
and do let me know if you require any further info.
