With this article, we would like to introduce to you a new category on this blog. Called "They launch in France...", we will use it to describe start-ups that launch in France, and see how they proceed and what can be improved.
The first company we will consider is Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a social dashboard that helps you manage your presence on the different social networks. It is particularly relevant for agencies or companies that need to have a clear sight of their online presence and of the interactions that are generated by this presence. Thus, Hootsuite provides analytics or scheduled publication tools.
They are available from France and announced that they launched in France due to an internationalization program. Everybody can contribute to the translation of Hootsuite. Crowd-sourcing the localization is an excellent way to have a quick deployment in a lot of countries; but it also implies that you don't really control the quality of the translation, and sometimes it feels like it's not a professional one.
On the Translate Program page, Hootsuite says that the french localization is almost 100% done. Lets consider it.
First, if you are a native, you will quickly notice that there are still a couple of strings that needed to be translated. In this first screenshot, the information displayed in the black box is in english,
as well as this element of the main menu in the image below (analytics is not a french word, we would better say "statistiques"),
or, such as the other menu below where french and english are mixed up.
Here, the full text is in english :
The second point where crowd-sourced localization finds its limits is on the quality of the translation. If in Hootsuite case, the translation correctly fits in the design, some sentences are not proper french. In the text below, words are missing.
In this other example, the first red box shows a sentence that might be written in a better way, and the second one points out a grammatical error.
The other important point you need to consider when you want to launch abroad and to reach a professional target (agencies, big companies...), such as Hootsuite does with its freemium business model, is the support you provide to your customers. In Hootsuite case, it seems that there are many ways to get information about this tool: they have a blog which provides relevant information, like white papers or articles regarding the improvements of the platform. They also have FAQ and a ticketing system. But all these tools are only in english. If you need help, you need to speak english.
An agency in France, or even worse, a big company, will pay for a tool if the service provided is easy to use. Communicating in english is definitely not a convenient way to get information for a french professional. If you expect to look like you are professional and the service you give deserved to be payed for, you need to be coherent and to provide a professional service: localization needs to be properly done, and the support has to be in the same language than your tool.
To conclude, the Hootsuite launch in France might be a good launch if their point is to reach a geek and B2C market. Geek because reading an english FAQ is not something everybody will do; geeks do. B2C because people won't pay in Europe, particularly in France, Spain or Italy, for services that are half-localized.
