While American English is the de facto standard of web presence language, it is not unusual for strategic customers and geographical locations to demand localised content. If your multi-national customers are demanding that their extranet or internet content be localised, there is a resulting cost for your organisation.
Traditionally, bureaux such as www.lionbridge.com or www.translantic.com undertook such work. This demanded translation of the hypertext and associated non-text content, site modifications, currency conversion and synchronisation, and were generally manually controlled and managed. In this traditional solution, there are few up-front costs, but the downstream maintenance costs are extremely high. This solution can only be optimal if you have minimal translation needs or if your presence is mainly static.
