Speciality printers worldwide can now access information on the main FESPA website in all the languages spoken by the 37 national FESPAAssociations, following an intense programme to localise content on its website.
The initiative has used machine translation software to make the last six months of online content more accessible to its global community, at a time when free access to industrynews, educational features, and guidance on best practice and commercial recovery is critical for so many print businesses.
CEO Neil Felton explains: “FESPA serves a global community, and while we have always aimed to offer our core content in English, German and Spanish, it would previously have been cost-prohibitive to translate all content into all the full range of languages spoken by our members. This machine learning approach to localisation, while not perfect, should help many more printers to make extensive use of our expert content, whatever their spoken language.”
FESPA’s national associations to refine technical translations
Local editing teams at each of FESPA’s national associations will refine technical translations to improve accuracy and readability over time, and all new content will immediately be available in all languages.
The localised versions of the website are accessible using the drop-down menu on the website landing page. In addition to English, German and Spanish, new options include Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Nepali, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Urdu.
Neil Felton adds: “Fespa.com already attracts 73,000 pageviews every month, and we curate the site to provide a valuable source of information, education, and inspiration for speciality printers, with a broad range of content from our own experts and external contributors. With this investment, we aim to extend FESPA’s educational value to more printers all over the world and make FESPA.com a favourite online meeting point for our global print ‘family’, just as our live events bring us together in the real world.”
2023 promises an interesting ride for print in India
Indian Printer and Publisher founded in 1979 is the oldest B2B trade publication in the multi-platform and
multi-channel IPPGroup. While the print and packaging industries have been resilient in the past 33 months since the pandemic lockdown of 25 March 2020, the commercial printing and newspaper industries have yet to recover their pre-Covid trajectory.
The fragmented commercial printing industry faces substantial challenges as does the newspaper industry.
While digital short-run printing and the signage industry seem to be recovering a bit faster, ultimately
their growth will also be moderated by the progress of the overall economy. On the other hand book
printing exports are doing well but they too face several supply-chain and logistics challenges.
The price of publication papers including newsprint has been high in the past year while availability is diminished by several mills shutting down their publication paper and newsprint machines in the past four years. Indian paper mills are also exporting many types of paper and have raised prices for Indian printers. To some extent, this has helped in the recovery of the digital printing industry with its on-demand short-run and low-wastage paradigm.
Ultimately digital print and other digital channels will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future. For instance, there is no alternative to a rise in textbook consumption but this segment will only reach normality in the next financial year beginning on 1 April 2023.
Thus while the new normal is a moving target and many commercial printers look to diversification, we believe that our target audiences may shift and change. Like them, we will also have to adapt with agility to keep up with their business and technical information needs.
Our 2023 media kit is ready, and it is the right time to take stock and reconnect with your potential markets and customers. Print is the glue for the growth of liberal education, new industry, and an emerging economy. We seek your participation in what promises to be an interesting ride.
