Phuket.Net Real Estate specialises in residential and investment properties focusing on the tropical island of Phuket, Thailand. They have built a reputation as one of the island’s leading independant real estate agents and boast a highly experienced team who have lived on Phuket for a total of over 90 years.

Phuket.Net was launched in 2005 as a Phuket portal site with information on where to stay, what to do, etc. The company began offering holiday rental bookings from which they began to learn about the holiday home market in Phuket. From our holiday rentals business we began to receive many inquiries from people about investing in real estate on the island, particularly in regards to holiday homes that would generate a healthy investment return.

“The natural progression for the website was born from the lessons we learned from the inquiries we received. It became clear that there were many people out there looking for holiday or investment properties here in Phuket, as well as homes for rent, and that they needed advice and guidance from people who know the market on theisland as well as we do.”

Richard Jones, Chief Technology Officer, was in charge of localizing the site contents. They didn’t translate their whole site, but chose ICanLocalize to translate the underlying template (or theme) of their sites, then they used their own real estate agents to translate individual properties. ICL string translation was the ideal option for their needs, in this case.

Translations Help Businesses

Phuket is a tropical island paradise which is developing rapidly. In recent years a growing number of foreigners are choosing Phuket as a destination where they holiday, relocate, invest or work and the need to have their websites in multiple languages has grown from the diversity of individuals from different nationalities who are interested in Phuket.

Richard explained: “as a first time user of ICanLocalize and also this being the first multilingual site that we have worked on, we were overly impressed by both the system and service offered.” He told us that getting started was very straightforward and they were up-and-running translating within 10 minutes and by the end of the day they had been contacted by a number of ICanlocalize translators. They reviewed their profiles and selected both their translator and reviewer.

With translation and review there’s no margin for error. The output was a 100% quality translation!

“The process for selecting translators was very easy, transparent and we were confident to go ahead with the service.” Richard told us.

Richard also stated to have found online documentation that was clear: “Documentation was clear, in-depth where necessary and, again, installed us with the confidence to go ahead with using the service without hesitation or further consultation.”

Quality and Interaction with Translators

Richard expressed his full satisfaction with ICanLocalize translation & translators. “The quality of the translators and reviewers that we experienced was the most impressive part of the whole service. They were simply great. Quick to respond, working all hours of the day, extremely fastidious and, again, installed us with confidence that we were getting a professional and bespoke translation of our website.”

He found communication with the translators through the ICanlocalize system pretty simple, intuitive and aided in getting the French translation of the site done quickly and to the highest of standards.

Richard Jones

Chief Technology Officer

Phuket.Net

Pineridge Bakery is the home of two of Canada’s leading manufacturers of value-added and premium baked goods, Gourmet Baker and Oakrun Farm Bakery.

With over 60 years combined baking expertise, They offer an unparalleled portfolio and full range of unique and innovative thaw-and-sell, ready-to-serve, freezer-to-oven and proof-and-bake products.

Ben McEvoy is the producer and web designer for both sites: oakrun.com and gourmetbaker.com. Ben decided to make use of ICanLocalize professional services for the localization of both websites into French.

It’s necessary to localize your website in the current globalized world we’re living in -unless you’re willing to miss big sales oportunities!

Gourmet Baker is a leading manufacturer of baked and unbaked desserts and breakfast pastries for the in-store bakery and foodservice business segments. Theymake a wide variety of fully decorated cakes, Danish pastries, croissants, crumpets, deluxe dessert bars and squares. They have two bakeries located in Burnaby, British Columbia and one bakery in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Their focus and success is based on using the finest quality ingredients, employing rigorous product safety standards in their bakery operations, and their ability to customize and build strong relationships with our customers while delighting consumers.

Oakrun Farm Bakery is a high-quality, highly efficient supplier of affordable fresh and frozen baked goods to the retail, foodservice, private label and co-pack business segments. They produce Danish pastries, cakes, tarts, bagels, English muffins, crumpets, sweet muffins, hotcakes and proportioned frozen batters. Oakrun Farm Bakery is located in Ancaster, Ontario.

During an interview with our support guru Ben McEvoy said: “I’m impressed at how all this worked pretty well. We had about 300 pages which got translated quickly and efficiently.” He explained he was looking for an efficient translation service and came to ICanLocalize. And WPML was the best plugin to manage the whole localization project, and he could do so right from his CMS. Ben talked with his client who said to be impressed by the seamless integration of the translation with their wordpress site.

As regards the translation work itself, he thought he’d get word by word translation at first. Ben explained that, in fact, he found almost a copyeditor who not only reviewed her own translation work with great professionalism but also provided feedback about the original text, asked questions that helped improve the source text. “ICL is not expensive at all and I found a really competent and professional translator here,” he stated.

In Canada national firms need to get localized, otherwise they would miss reaching very important markets. Businesses need to have their English sites in French too.

Having about 300 pages to localize, Ben found in ICanLocalize and WPML the perfect combination for his needs!

Ben McEvoy

Producer & web designer

Diaverum is one of the world’s leading providers of renal care and the largest independent service provider in Europe. Diaverum has a strong heritage in renal care that dates back 20 years, when the first dialysis clinic in what is now Diaverum was established. Since then, Diaverum has been at the forefront of the renal service markets. Operations currently serve a patient base of more than 18 000 individuals.

Fredrik Henrysson, Director of External Communications, explains “Diaverum operates in 16 countries in 13 languages. Our websites are central to all our external communication. And an efficient translation, translation review and web publishing workflow is essential for our external web presence. After testing and evaluating several different translation solutions, we decided to implement ICanLocalize.”

Diaverum first tested the software and services provided by ICanLocalize on a campaign website built in WordPress implementing ICanLocalize WPML plugin. “The plugin was installed by a developer in an hour. I was able to initiate translations from WordPress the same day.” Fredrik continues.

“I have 15 years experience managing web projects and I was truly impressed about the quality and ease of use of the WPML plugin. But we also learned that a website needs to be coded right to be able to take advantage of the WPML plugin.” Fredrik explains.

The initial project involved 4 languages and 2 000 words of content. The next step was to use ICanLocalize for the main websites, involving 13 languages and 18 000 words of content. Here, Diaverum opted to use Drupal as the CMS and develop an in-house review and approval workflow.

Fredrik also explained: “All our translations need to be reviewed by internal reviewers and approved by 16 country managers with little time to learn complicated web systems and the global Corporate Communication team needed a waterproof workflow to make sure that content is translated, reviewed and approved by the local country organization.” For Fredrik working with ICanLocalize has been a very positive experience as ICanLocalize has enabled them to translate a larger volume of content, which is key to their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) effort. “We have seen an increase in visitors as a direct result from implementing ICanLocalize. For us the main benefits are:

• Cost efficiency. We have cut our yearly translations cost by 50%

• Quality. Our experience is that the translators from ICanLocalize are as good or better compared to other traditional agencies.

• Flexibility. It is very easy to implement the services and software from ICanLocalize

• Support. We have received excellent and fast support from ICanLocalize

The only area where I see ICanLocalize could improve is usability of their administrator interface, but this is only a minor comment. If you have a question, ICanLocalize support will answer promptly.” Fredrik concludes.

When Frederik talks to his colleges about ICanLocalize, they don’t think it’s true. It’s hard to believe a translation service can be both cheap and top notch. But there’s no trick! Frederik proved it and there’s no trick. He saw the resumes, interviewed translators himself and immediately realised that ICL works only with qualified translators.

Why is it so affordable? Because ICL also offers translators benefits that other agencies or portals do not offer, they work on safe grounds and have recurring work, with the necessary tools at their hands.

Frederik Henrysson

External Communications Director

Diaverum Contact

Media Interactiva offers Development, Education and Microsoft/Adobe official certification. Under development. They offer a big range of services: outsourcing, localization, SEO and SEM positioning, technological consultancy, software development, software testing, web design, graphic design, e-learning.

One of the biggest areas for Media Interactiva is Education. They offer different courses specialized in Microsoft Office and Adobe products: online and face to face training. After having completed a course, students take the official exam -included in the price of the course-, so they don’t only get certified by Media Interactiva, but also from the official company they are learning for. Since Media Interactiva is an official testing center for Certiport, students can perform the exam to obtain the official certificate for various Microsoft products (Microsoft Office Specialist, Microsoft Technology Associate) and Adobe. Since 2005 Certiport has been their main client. Media Interactiva develops and localizes exams for this company, whose main clients are Microsoft and Adobe.

Sam Brocal, Media Interactiva owner, realized there was a strong need to localize Media Interactiva from Spanish -language in which it was originally created- into English. Sam was interviewed by ICanLocalize support guru, and he said “I think the system is a fantastic idea. Within an hour, I already had my translator chosen out of a few which replied really quick. I thought this was going to take a bit longer, but it was fast and efficient. Getting the content localized was easy too, since it went directly into my WordPress admin area.” Sam selected a professional translator from ICanLocalize and just concentrated on his work.

He explained that the translation work was completed in 3 business days (nearly 4000 words). That was what he was expecting, or even faster. “The interaction with the translator has also been fantastic. He worked as a team member, stayed in touch all the time, and provided constant advice regarding changes he made to the text and why he made them. I will definitely work with him again.” He stated.

He also said that the multilingual module is excellent. When they started working on the Spanish site and finally decided to use WordPress, one of their main worries was localization. Sam wondered: “What about localization? How can we not get our site localized if we offer localization services?” Doing some research they found the multilingual module WPML and he stated: “It was the best money I expend recently. It is a powerful tool with lots of useful extra little modules, which make the full localization easy and quick.”

He mentioned many advantages of using WPML: easy to install and set up, lots of customization options, easy to handle languages, easy to deal with localizations, easy to find and talk to translators, easy to insert/delete languages, able to view the site in the language you are localizing, and hide it to the world until you are completed. He’s been using the Multilanguage module WPML for a couple of weeks and everything worked better than he expected.

They will be doing the site in German, French, Russian, Japanese and Chinese Simplified. “The investment to localize the site into another language using the multilingual module WPML is worth it as we might get new business in those countries. If clients can´t read your site, you will not get new business.”

Sam Brocal

Media Interactiva Owner