Company
The Eurologos strategy and its international markets
It is necessary to synthetically describe the concept and positioning around which the Eurologos Group bases its activities. These constitute the foundation and, at the same time, the substance of its international organization.
Multinationalization, a necessity rather than an option
The international organization of Eurologos doesn’t only depend on a drive for marketing power. This is even a rather secondary factor in the face of the concept developed by Eurologos which was inevitably needed for a company which produces a multitude of languages applied to translation, to web and software localization, to the globalization of communication services, etc.
This necessity, resulting from multilingual service production, requires a multilocalization of offices, each producing a language, the target language spoken in the country in which the multilingual services company is situated. In this sense, we can talk of a specific geostyle used on the geomarketing territory (for example the Portuguese of Portugal and not of Brazil, Castilian of Spain and not Spanish of Latin America).
For more than fifty years, the great translatologists have been stating the fact that linguistic quality can only be produced with mother tongue-translators living in the target language market. Indeed it is an established fact that translators, revisers, and localizers regularly make lexical-interference and phraseology errors induced by the lingua franca used on a daily basis... Of course, this statement applies to the domain of so-called “pragmatic” multilingual services, which is to say those concerning commercial, technical and advertising communication. This domain is exactly that of Eurologos activities.
The growing necessity for multilingualism: the clients’ languages
The most striking macroeconomic process of our time, globalization, requires more and more multilingualism. Companies must always export more, and institutions must get in touch with the various populations whose mother tongues are not those of the countries they reside in. The client’s language and that of their interlocutor is therefore always required. Furthermore, it must be quality, because, paradoxically, globalization has even increased the orthosyntactic, terminological, and stylistic level of the lesser-known languages. In brief, languages, their geostyles and quality are from now on an integral part of the competitiveness of products for sale and of the efficiency of institutional communication.
The multilingual services markets are consequently growing. The production of this quality constitutes the keystone of their success especially in markets, such as ours, characterized by a domination of supply over demand.
Is it possible to produce multilingual quality with only one office?
The observation of markets relative to linguistic service companies show that over 99% (!) of multilingual services companies are exclusively monolocalized companies. These companies – very often tiny – although monolocalized in one country, claim they can provide their clients and prospects languages which they themselves aren’t capable of either reading or writing. Thus, that they do not know how to correct.
Given that linguistic quality – as for all quality – is a function of the classic “control-action, correction-validation” process, these monolocalized companies cannot structurally guarantee their clients and prospects the promised quality. The only language or languages these companies can legitimately ensure are properly only the language or languages that are spoken in their own country.
It is not surprising that these so-called “multilingual” service companies are always called “mailboxes” in the business: agencies that are content with delivering to their clients, without any linguistic control, texts received and subcontracted to their freelancers or to other agencies that are counterparts as much as competitors.
Clients are ignorant of this phenomenon of course, and these competitors cultivate, instead of fighting, their translatological ignorance. Furthermore, clients are not commercially guilty because they cannot be accused of a lack of knowledge or being deficient in a field which isn’t theirs (which they have specialized in).
The fatality of overclaim advertising and the exceptional interest of the multilingual services markets
All these “mailboxes” consequently live off what is known as “overclaim” advertising: an excess of promises made to prospects (the Total Quality) in contrast with the means they dispose of to produce and control it effectively.
Furthermore, the availability of as many offices as idioms or geostyles to the client, is no more expensive than the prices offered by monolocalized agencies. More often than not, Eurologos can provide the cheapest prices: production in the target countries (less expensive) can even allow coupling and reconciliation – which is rare – of quality and price.
Glocalism instead of the false globalism/localism alternative
The concept discovered without too much thought by Eurologos, but with concern for honesty vis-à-vis the markets, was defined with a keyword by our group: “glocalism”. Indeed, Californians in the 90’s coined this new term, stemming from the contraction of two words, very often abusively opposed: globalism and localism.
Surely one cannot be global without being simultaneously local. The analogical parallel for Eurologos and its concept seemed immediately obvious: in a multilingual company, one can only dispose of a productive “glocalized” organization. An office for each language or geostyle promised to current and future clients!
Word spread rapidly: there were more than half a million hits for glocal on the Internet in February 2007, in seven languages.
){kind=link}