As I said in my last post, we can get so fixated on introducing new CRM technologies that we forget about one of the other underlying tenets or modern business – that of expanding into new markets. Nothing presents a bigger barrier to that than language. There are few things that say “I really don’t care that much about you as a customer” than the inability to speak that customer’s language. But that’s what many companies are forced to do every day. Translation costs a lot, and at a certain point you have to limit the number of languages you can support.

Are there ways to leverage technology to get around this? There are, and one of them owes its existence to the war in Afghanistan. After the fall of the Taliban in 2002, the U.S. military brought back a lot of documents in Arabic – “a boxcar full of them,” according to Mark Tapling, president and CEO of Language Weaver. A request for a proposal was issued for technology to help in translating this material; Tapling and his team built a statistical engine that could perform source-to-target translation from Arabic into English, thus creating the platform that became Language Weaver.