Here’s an obvious statement: Businesses need to grow. If you’re a business owner or stakeholder, you have certainly lost sleep worrying about how to grow your business. How to hit targets for the quarter? How to hit targets for the year? How to reach your 5 or 10 year vision?
Proven growth strategies might include:
- Diversification of service lines
- Market expansion into new states or cities
- Development of innovative features within a product to help differentiate
All of these can undoubtedly move the needle for your business. For us at Language Network, a “no-brainer” growth strategy for any business is to translate your content into other languages. Depending on which source you look at, only about 20% of the world speaks English! Think about that! Your Total Addressable Market is actually quite fractured and full of language barriers! If you’re thinking of your TAM as only English-speaking buyers, we’d encourage you to reframe the strategy!
Take Mr. Beast’s Youtube channels as a great example of the power of international expansion…
We found this exchange between Joe Rogan and his guest “Mr. Beast” to be quite interesting. Mr. Beast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, is a wildly successful Youtuber. His content regularly goes viral and he’s built an entrepreneurial empire off of his, and his team’s, creativity. By localizing his content he has amassed over 200 million Youtube subscribers across 12+ languages. Whether or not you’re a fan of Rogan or Mr. Beast, we can confirm that the strategy for growth, that Mr. Beast describes, is a tried and proven method to expand your business. Consider the following dialogue:
Mr. Beast: I’m kind of curious why you don’t do this. We do our videos in other languages as well.”
Joe Rogan: “Really? Wow!”
Mr. Beast: I can’t wait to show you this. [The two look at a screen with Mr. Beast’s Youtube channel “Mr. Beast en Español”]
Joe Rogan: Who does this?
Mr. Beast: We do it.
Joe Rogan: You hire someone?
Mr. Beast: Yeah, we have voice actors and everything.
Joe Rogan: Woooow… Mr. Beast en Español. That is so smart!
Mr. Beast: Click on a video so you can hear it. [Video plays for several seconds in Spanish]
Mr. Beast: Scroll down so you can see the comments. There… It's all in Spanish.
Joe Rogan: That’s dope.
Mr. Beast: I won’t pull them all up, but search “Mr. Beast Brazil”
Joe Rogan: Ahhhh… so you have a Portuguese translator as well. That’s dope! I love it! What a great idea man!
Mr. Beast: Yeah, so if you Google it, like only less than 10% of the world speaks English, so, 90% of the world can’t even enjoy your content.
Time out: Did you get that? That’s a stat that business owners and stakeholders should be very interested in. Okay, time in…
Mr. Beast: … and when I realized that, I was like, wait a minute. 90% of the world can’t even watch this stuff. So, go back to the Spanish one. That’s our most popular. And we just started doing this stuff six months ago and it’s crazy how viral some of these videos are going.
Joe Rogan: Wow… 51 million [views]. The problem for me though is, if you have someone translate it, if they’re going to say exactly what I said.
Mr. Beast: Well you have quality control to make sure things line up and we catch any red flags. We built a system where I don’t have to worry about that.
So, clearly Mr. Beast’s channel has seen even more success by focusing on key international languages. Language Network's mission is to enable our clients to do the very same thing for their organizations and we’ve been doing it for over 30 years.
Joe raised a good point about quality concerns. There is indeed a long list of error type categories that can impact the quality of your translation. At Language Network we go above and beyond best practices to mitigate the quality concerns Joe raises…
- We hire only the best translators. Not only are they bilingual and multilingual native speakers, they’re credentialed, trained and highly experienced in translation, which includes skills in things like “equivalence judgment.” A lot of people think, if you speak two languages you could be a good translator. Yes and no. A good translator is not just bilingual, but they have refined judgment in making decisions in how to convert ideas, moods, sentiments, idiomatic phrases, etc. They don’t approach a text on a word for word level, rather a meaning for meaning level. This allows translations to be both accurate and sound natural in the target language. You want your end users to have a very natural experience with your product and services, and good translators can help ensure this happens.
- We follow a quality control process (which Mr. Beast mentions his team also does) whereby translations are checked by a second, equally qualified linguist, to catch and edit any errors, or to simply make sure the message reads smoothly, and in some cases, even better than the original.
Having worked in Localization for 15 years, I can sometimes forget that the rest of the world is not spending their 9 to 5 thinking about translation and localization processes, best practices, linguistic assets and resources, Translation and Terminology Management Systems and on and on. And it’s not just me!
Everyone at Language Network is focused on making international programs, like Mr. Beast’s, a reality. It’s who we are and it’s what we do as “Localizers”! And it’s safe to say that even when we’re not at work, we’re often reading about new and innovative ideas coming out of the Translation and Localization industry. So, it can be surprising to us to hear Joe Rogan respond as if what Mr. Beast has done was a novel idea! But, it makes sense! Of course not everyone is constantly thinking about global expansion like we are at Language Network!
At Language Network, we are who you want handling your multilingual needs. Why? Because, going global is always on our minds! We think you deserve a partner and company made up of people who are constantly thinking about helping companies succeed internationally through the best of the best translation and localization services.
Mr. Beast is almost entirely focused on multilingual audio dubbing for videos, which we can absolutely help you with. We can also help you achieve international growth by…
- Enabling multiple languages on your website and eCommerce site to enable international sales
- Unlocking international SEO
- Translating your support articles, which also reduces overhead for your Support team
- Localizing your eLearning content
- Deploying AI and Machine Translation solutions for rapid international messaging
- Providing consulting for a global localization strategy while helping your org achieve cross-functional efficiencies.
Reference video:
Youtube Blog Interview with Mr Beast on going international.