At the last Email Insider Summit I was invited to sit on a panel to discuss what it takes to go global with your email program. The short answer is: it takes a lot of planning, extra time and budget and preferably local resources.

At my previous company, my team was responsible for sending out a newsletter to 12 different European countries — in the native language. Our corporate headquarters (located in Ottawa, Canada) would come up with the main content for the newsletter, but each country had the chance to add local news. And then the fun began…

We would send the final copy (in English) to translators in each of the
different countries. Even the UK version had to be "localised". We
couldn’t do one Dutch version for both the Netherlands and Flemish part
of Belgium, because even though the language is the same, we have
different ways of saying things. The same for the French part of
Belgium, the French part of Switzerland and France. And for Germany,
Austria and German-speaking Switzerland.

Once the copy was translated and localized, we would send it for review
to each country and they would approve or make corrections.

We would then code each of the emails separately, only to find out that
what you can say in English in two lines, you need four lines to say
the same thing in French… So the design didn’t work anymore, of
course.

And then there was another obstacle: the email platform that we used
did not support foreign characters, so we had to manually replace all
the letters with accents with their HTML codes.

And when we sent the final version of the email out for final approval
by the countries, we would learn that we can’t e.g. use a picture of an
Asian-looking woman for a German audience. Or the screenshot would have
to be in French…

In the end we had it all figured out, but getting there was a slow and painful process.

Anyway, you can watch a video of our panel at the Email Insider Summit here. And here’s another interesting case study from MarketingSherpa about translating email campaigns.