Contributed by Ofer Tirosh, founder and CEO of Tomedes,

As entrepreneurs, we tend to be focused on our products, services and regional growth. We don’t often pay enough attention to the business potential of secondary, foreign markets. But the fact is that foreign markets may end up being a substantial or even majority source of growth and revenue.

An essential part of foreign growth is foreign languages. And the relative cost of translating and localizing content is far less than the cost of creating original content. Therefore it is logical, and imperative, that entrepreneurs think early, and often, about globalizing their products and services. Translate and adapt your valuable content into additional languages and set up multilingual marketing, sales and support infrastructure.

Best Practices for Going Global Cost-Effectively

As the founder of a translation company back in 2007, I am an entrepreneur. I freely admit that I underestimated the need for translation and its offshoot, localization, early on. My initial focus was on the low-hanging fruit of translating from Hebrew to English for the many startups in Israel. These organizations weren’t thinking of Spanish or French, let alone Arabic, Hindi and Chinese. They just wanted business translation of their marketing and technical documentation into the lingua franca of the business world. Since that time, however, my company and I have seen an explosion of interest in translation and localization services.