Bienvenido a SOS in Spanish!

With over 12,000 business centres worldwide, SOS caters for an international clientele. By limiting our website functionality to just English, however, we appeal only to the English-speaking world. In order to become a truly global business, we needed to take it a step further; by translating and localising the SOS website into various languages, including Spanish, French, German and Chinese.

Through translating and localising all relevant SOS website content, we hope that it will now become much more accessible to the global community that SOS connects with and, just this week, we have gone live in the first language – Spanish.

Natalie Pearlman, Head of Translation and Localisation at SOS, who has been heading up the project, said, “Now that we have launched the site in Spanish, it will be great to see how our new and improved product will boost business within the Spanish market.”

Having started this project in summer 2013, Natalie explained the challenges which go into this seemingly simple process. Initially, the source material (website content) must be analysed and evaluated, in order to set a budget and to look at any design and functionality aspects which might require significant changes in the back and front-end development; the next stage involves sourcing qualified and experienced linguists in the fields of Business and Marketing, including copywriters, translators and proofreaders; the translation templates must then be created, ready for translation, followed by proofreading; everything is checked for consistency and for SEO readiness; then the back and front-end development processes begin, ready for testing before going live!

Organising and managing a team of qualified linguists, alongside working with the designers and web developers to create the website in Spanish, has been a challenging but rewarding job for Natalie, who has a Master’s degree in Technical and Specialised Translation.

Natalie concluded, “Not only does translating and localising our website into other languages attract more potential business, but it also raises our status within the professional world, as we then become keen supporters of internationalisation and understand that this is key for growth within the serviced office industry.”

The team looks forward to putting the rest of the languages live throughout the year, with further plans for other languages and dialects. Why not head over to the website homepage of SOS now to see the site in Spanish?