Presently, it is rather expensive to build global sites. Speaking of business sites, they generally approach a translation company with their existing sites and are turned away when they learn the typical cost of $20,000 - $100,000 per language because of the sheer word volume of the sites. They do not know they can approach a Web globalization specialist and start a dynamic global site based upon their existing business site within the budget they can afford. $5,000 should suffice to build a separate global site targeting at the major language markets with the limited number of pages. Such a global site should employ the dynamic page generation technique, so that the client can build up his global site with flexibility, based upon the development in each language market. A flexible step by step approach is the key in developing a business global site most economically.

For Private sites, any expense exceeding $500 would be out of the question. This could cover only the cost for introducing the dynamic global structure to a private site, and it would not provide any budget for traditional translation. However, you could turn to a machine translation and provide the foreign language texts within the budget. This way, your site will be displayed in that foreign language when visiting browsers are set at that language. Although the current machine translation software can convey the meaning vaguely, the translated sentences are clumsy and sometimes broken. You would need a partner, whose mother tongue is that foreign language, and who is willing to brush up the sentences for your site in exchange of the same service to his/her private site that you would provide. Hopefully, this community site can become the meeting place for those reciprocal partners.