In a constantly changing world, are you ready to elevate your business to the metaverse?
When the CEO of Facebook (now Meta), Mark Zuckerberg, announced the plans for creating Metaverse in October 2021, many of us were puzzled, yet most of us have come to realize that today’s technology presents endless opportunities. It is clear that the metaverse is going to change the way we interact with one another. While you must have heard a lot about Metaverse, what is it actually and how does it work? How will we interact with each other in that digital space, or what language will we speak in that whole new world?
We know for sure that Metaverse will be a 3D space for interaction, learning, and socialization. As Meta Announced, “Meta’s focus will be to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses”. So we can expect new opportunities for personal communication and business development. To connect people through the metaverse, Meta is developing:
- Virtual Reality
- Augmented Reality
- Smart Glasses
We can imagine metaverse as a space without any communication barriers. A space where borders and distance do not matter.
Even though the metaverse concept is still under development, some countries have shown a keen interest to get involved. Earlier this year, South Korea aimed to become the 5th largest metaverse market by 2026, reported by The Korea Herald, with a plan to train 40,000 professionals among 220 companies specialized in the metaverse. While U.S. firms such as Meta and Microsoft are going all-out on the metaverse concept, China’s technology giants, from Tencent to Alibaba and ByteDance, are also investing in the metaverse with different approaches. According to Morgan Stanley and CNBC, the market could be worth $8 trillion in the future.
Metaverse is expected to provide borderless spaces for exchanging innovative ideas, digital services, as well as physical products selling through eCommerce. Business objectives are one of the key elements, and to position your brands and businesses to be a front runner, the initial strategy is how to engage with people and connect them with your business.
While 50% of online buyers only buy from websites in their native tongue, up to 72.4% of online buyers are more likely to buy a product if the information on an eCommerce platform is available in their own language. The need for localizing products, websites, and customer services to target markets is inevitable. To put your brands on the metaverse, English is simply not enough.
Based on the latest 2022 figures, there are a total of 7,000 languages in the world. Less than 5% of the world’s population are native English speakers (372.9 million), while there are almost 1 billion people who speak Mandarin Chinese. Now, the first and foremost question is: Can we overcome language barriers in the metaverse?
The answer is to make your company’s vision accessible in as many languages as you can. Start preparing for the metaverse now, so you can transfer your business to the new reality as smoothly as possible in the near future. The first place to start is with languages.
EQHO, one of Asia’s leading translation & localization service providers, has a long history of providing multilingual content on all digital platforms. Headquartered in Singapore, with end-to-end production centers in Thailand and Laos. EQHO has expertise in 65 languages and provides strategic globalization advice to 1,460 companies across Asia, Europe, and the U.S.
EQHO provides a full scope of localization services, from document translation to multilingual voiceover. This includes uncountable websites, eLearning courses, brand communication through social media and operating manuals, plus voice dubbing and subtitling for games, movies, T.V. series and commercial advertisements.
EQHO – Localization. Multimedia Production. Brand Communications.
- Photos using in this article contained graphics from ReadyPlayerMe – Cross-game Avatar Platform for the Metaverse. ‘
- Photos courtesy of Unsplash / stephan sorkin / Hammer & Tusk / Libby Penner
- A version of this post was published on Thai-Swedish Chamber of Commerce website www.swecham.com on Mar. 19, 2022 with the headline Bridging Communication Gaps in the Metaverse.
