Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti (1774-1849) was possibly the most multilingual person in history. The remarkable cardinal, once the head of the Vatican library, reportedly could speak some 50 languages fluently.

The United Parcel Service (UPS) of America isn’t close to challenging Mezzofanti’s impressive record, but the Atlanta-based company is working on it. UPS, which delivers more than 13 million packages daily in more than 200 countries, operates localized websites that support 19 variations of 12 languages.

UPS realized more than four years ago that people tend to be most comfortable viewing websites that use their own language. "Local language support is a courtesy that increases trust in your company while encouraging repeated and longer site visits," says Rakesh Sapra, UPS’s director of interactive marketing.

The company isn’t alone in realizing that the Internet requires global language support. Thirty-seven percent of websites operated by Fortune 100 companies incorporate a language other than English, according to Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. Yet, surprisingly, that figure hasn’t budged much since 1998, when 32 percent of the companies Forrester surveyed offered multilingual sites.

Why the stall? Forrester, like other observers, blames the lack of progress on a combination of management, technical and cultural difficulties. According to Marc Liggio, vice president of Allied Business Intelligence, a technology research company in Oyster Bay, N.Y., these problems aren’t likely to disappear anytime soon. "In the meantime, companies will have to work hard to ensure a successful multilingual effort," he says.

Easier Said Than Read

For UPS, assembling a multilingual website has been an incremental process. The company launched its first, English-only site in 1995 and added European languages the following year. Additional languages arrived in stages during the next few years. This past fall, the company also added several Asian languages.

Site management has been the biggest woe for UPS’s multilingual initiative. "Lots of planning is necessary to make a multilingual site successful, everything from deciding who creates the content to what software to use to how the site will look," says Sapra. Like many companies with multilingual websites, UPS relies on local personnel to provide content that’s tailored to the needs of regional customers and business partners. "The people located in the country itself are the ones most able to deliver the quality we need," he says.

While ceding control of site content and design to local offices helps to ensure a competent reflection of indigenous business practices and personal customs, the approach is not without peril. Companies can find themselves losing control of their international Web presence as language barriers prevent central office managers from effectively monitoring local sites. Yet without local involvement, a company’s multilingual efforts will likely fail, since central office workers typically lack the in-depth knowledge that makes a local site an authentic and useful experience.