Ahead of Black Friday, Israeli translation firm opens world for China retailers

For retailers in China, the Internet has become a window through which they can sell their goods directly to the rest of the world, especially “retail-challenged” areas such as large parts of Russia and the Arabic-speaking world. And an Israeli firm is helping them reach those previously hard-to-get customers.

According to One Hour Translation, the Israel-based firm that is the world’s largest online translation agency, requests for translations by Chinese online retailers has climbed dramatically in the past year as retailers and manufacturers reach out to new customer bases. Requests for translations from Mandarin to Russian rose approximately 81% during that period, and for Chinese to Arabic, requests were up about 52%.

The data came from an analysis OHT did on its customer base last month, examining more than 10,000 translation projects performed over the past year for e-commerce websites around the world. The company has 15,000 translators in 120 countries translating between more than 2,500 language pairs (all the combinations of the 75 languages OHT handles).

The biggest spikes in translation requests, said the firm, come in the weeks leading up to what have become the internationally acknowledged shopping festivals, such as Singles Day (11/11, a Chinese innovation that has spread worldwide), US Thanksgiving-associated shopping days Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and of course all of December and the beginning of January (encompassing Christmas, Boxing Day, and the January “White Sales.)

As Chinese consumers close their wallets a bit in light of the country’s recent stock market and debt woes, Chinese sites are also trying to reach out to more English-speaking customers. Sites like Alibaba, DX, ChinaBuye, and many others are working with wholesalers and manufacturers in China to drop-ship goods directly to customers in the US and Europe. Those goods are available in almost every retail chain anyway, but by directly shipping to customers, manufacturers can keep a bigger piece of the retail pie for themselves, skipping the wholesale and shipping middlemen while undercutting the retail price for goods.

To appeal to those customers, Chinese firms need a presentable site that makes sense to English speakers – and while the large retailers like Alibaba can afford to hire their own translation staff, smaller ones are likely to call on firms like OHT for translation services. Indeed, requests from online Chinese merchants and e-commerce sites for translations from Mandarin to English rose by approximately 116% in the past year.

Retailers in the US, like those in China, are suffering from anemic sales at home – and they, too are seeking new markets. According to OHT, English-language websites have increased their efforts in Russian, Arabic and Mandarin-Chinese speaking markets, albeit at a lower rate than Chinese sites. Between 2014 and 2015, requests from online English-language merchants for translations to Russian rose by approximately 39%, while requests for translation from English to Arabic rose approximately 21% and requests for translation from English to Mandarin-Chinese rose approximately 17%. Requests for translations from English to Korean rose only by approximately 5%, while English to German increased only approximately 2%.

“Over the past few years we have witnessed a revolution in the world of e-commerce and have experienced cross-continent phenomena such as the successful penetration of Alibaba into the US market,” said Ofer Shoshan, CEO and co-founder of One Hour Translation. “These market changes significantly affect the languages and audiences targeted by the e-commerce companies. The heads of the e-commerce corporations in China have noticed that Russian and American customers are rushing to make purchases on the Chinese websites as they become aware of the vast selection of Chinese products sold at a fraction of the price compared to their local markets. This is a primary reason why Chinese websites are translated so comprehensively to English and Russian, and over the past year even into Arabic.”

“Another phenomenon that we have noticed in our research is that e-commerce corporations are encouraging their online merchants to appeal to global audiences by translating the thousands of product descriptions in their online ‘stores’ into foreign languages,” added Shoshan. “The demand for translations is not created only by the e-commerce corporations, but also by the smaller merchants who sell their wares on large sites such as eBay and Taobao. This is one of the reasons that we anticipate that the global demand for translation of e-commerce material will significantly rise in the coming years.”