[LINK] e-Stores in French, German and Japanese

[Tom Worthington]

Amazon has a facility for setting up your own "store" to sell their 
products on commission. After setting up one for Amazon.com (the US 
based site in English) <http://astore.amazon.com/universalservice>, I 
set ones up with the German 
<http://astore.amazon.de/tomcomptyltd-21>, French 
<http://astore.amazon.fr/decommudetomw-21/> and Japanese 
<http://astore.amazon.fr/decommudetomw-21/> sites. This was 
challenging, as I don't speak any of these languages. The Japanese 
site offers an English interface for shoppers, but not for the 
re-sellers. The German and French sites offer no English at all.

I used a web translation service to translate the Amazon interface to 
English. That wasn't so hard for German and French, but more 
difficult for Japanese. It was not just a matter of word translation, 
as an example, I found that postal addresses are entered the opposite 
way around than in English (with state, city, street instead of 
street, city and state). But I managed to get through all that.

To see what they looked like, I then translated the sites back to 
English from French 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/admin/french_books.shtml>, German 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/transport/german_model_trains.shtml> 
and Japanese <http://www.tomw.net.au/admin/japanese_books.shtml>.

After carefully translating headings and sub headings into each of 
the languages and then discovering when translated back they were all 
nonsense, I put the captions in English. The hope is that English 
speakers will be attracted to the site for products which they can't 
get at the US Amazon site. This even applies to the UK Amazon, which 
is in English, but has different products to the US Amazon.

As an example the US amazon has a poor selection of high speed models 
of toy trains. This is because the USA doesn't have many real high 
speed trains. In contrast the UK Amazon offers models of the Eurostar 
<http://astore.amazon.co.uk/tomwcommunica-21/> and Germans get the 
ICE and Thalis <http://astore.amazon.de/tomcomptyltd-21>.

Apart from that I created speciality stores on subjects from 
Accessible Web Design 
<http://astore.amazon.com/accessible-web-design-20> to Walter Burley 
Griffin <http://astore.amazon.com/walterburleygriffin-20>. There is a 
full list in the blog version of this posting 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2006/12/e-stores-in-french-german-and-japanese.html>.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml