Mirror, Mirror on the Great Wall

Jonathan S. Landreth

Building a web site is high on the to-do list of businesses trying to break into the China market. Since many either can't afford, or aren't allowed, to expand beyond offices in Shanghai and Beijing, smart companies are opting for a virtual China presence on the World Wide Web.

Through a service many web designers call mirroring you can transform your company's English-language web site into a Chinese-language one -- and thus, these web companies promise, begin to tap the educated, urban market most likely to find and purchase your product on the Web.

But is it that simple? Not really. Just holding your company's English web site up to a Chinese 'mirror' and hoping for good results can be a very disappointing experience.

"Pure translation from English to Chinese throws money down the drain," says Micah Truman, a founder of madeforchina, a Beijing-based company that helps Westerners do business with Chinese.

Truman, a self-described 'human bumblebee,' spoke from his cell phone on his way to the Fortune World Forum in Shanghai. He says that web-mirroring -- simple translation and physically moving your web site to a Chinese host server -- requires little technical proficiency and offers little real value.

Cultural Gear-Shifting

The real skill comes in when a web company offers services that far outstrip just translating from one language to another, to helping a company bridge much deeper culture gaps.

Truman's business is a case in point. His bilingual expatriate and Chinese staff of 14 knocks down the language barrier every day. It's the cultural gear-shifting on the Information Highway that one must master to succeed in Web-selling, he says.

If there's anyone well on his way to mastering the art of cultural gear-shifting, it's Truman. After getting his start in business simply designing web sites and writing in "html," Truman soon realized that the much greater service he could provide were these wider translating skills -- especially how to graft the money machine that is popular culture in the West into a format that's understandable, useful, and enticing to growing markets of young Chinese consumers.

The result was 51Go [Chinese only hyperlink shown for design], a Chinese-language web site that attracts young Chinese men and women with events listings, chat rooms, feature stories and celebrity interviews. All these Western forms, however, are used to display distinctly Chinese content -- Chinese rock bands, Chinese jazz bars, and Chinese movie stars.

Solid as a Rock?

Yet selling fads is one thing, and selling Fords is another. Getting to the 18-32 year-old Chinese males who spend up to 30 hours on the Web each week is a snap. Just like 18-32 year olds in the West, these guys dream of cars and the freedom that a real open highway represents.

But once you've got them, how do you sell them? It's more than likely that a straight translation just won't do. The advertising slogan in the U.S. for Chevy trucks, for instance, is "Solid as a Rock." But in China, the status value of foreign cars is much more important than their durability -- and rocks in China, no less than in the West, hardly convey the notion of status to anyone.

Considering this cultural difference, a much better slogan for gleaming Ford trucks in China might actually be "As precious as jade."

A leading Internet analyst, Esther Dyson, cut to the heart of the intricacies of "mirroring" when, in remarks she made elsewhere on this web site, she explained that the Internet breaks down many barriers, but not all of them. Indeed, in many ways, not even the most important and difficult ones.

"For better or worse, while the Internet overcomes geographical boundaries, it leaves language and cultural barriers in place," she wrote. "By 2015, there will probably be much better translation technology, which will be widely used by commerce sites trying to reach Chinese customers and suppliers. But content sites will probably still be fragmented by language, as just one more feature of any interest group."

All the more important, then, to realize that translating your company's web site into Chinese isn't as easy as just having a look in the mirror.