Regardless of current career status, most people today would consider their smartphone to be essential to their everyday lives. In fact studies have shown that we are rarely more than just a few feet from our mobile devices. Fortunately, there are some excellent mobile apps that can help you manage your global business and improve your international trade knowledge while on-the-go.

1. Speak and Translate

While having the power to write text and instantly have it translated out loud in a foreign language may sound like science fiction, this app has made it a reality. If you are travelling in a foreign country and do not know the local language, it may just become your best friend. The app lets you choose between a wide variety of languages, and it is very simple to use.

2. International Trade Dictionary

Imagine that you are in an important business meeting and someone uses an international trade term that you have never heard of. Don’t want to ask and potentially embarrass yourself? You can simply take out your mobile device and discreetly look it up. Problem solved. Reading this dictionary is also a great way to expand your international trade knowledge and vocabulary.

3. HS Code Handbook

This app provides information about distinct national customs codes from all around the world. If you run an international business, it is absolutely crucial to have a solid understanding of customs codes for the countries you will be importing from or exporting to. If you don’t, you could wind up making mistakes that could cost your company valuable time and money. This app can help you quickly learn the relevant customs codes that you need to know.

4. UPS Mobile

With this app, you can monitor and keep a close eye on all of your shipping information. Your international product shipments are valuable and cost boatloads of money to ship. The ability to monitor your cargo with precision can give you a much better understanding of the whereabouts of your products, as well as the peace of mind that comes with knowing your shipment is safely on its way.

5. Hopper

Hopper is a great app if you have to travel at all for business. It monitors ticket prices for airfare and lets you know when the prices are the lowest. You can also book flights right through the app. How convenient! If your company regularly books flights, this app could potentially save your business thousands of dollars.

6. Slack

Slack is an incredibly handy communication and file sharing app that has become immensely popular in the business world. It allows you to communicate with your entire team instantaneously, all from the convenience of your mobile device.

The crucial thing about Slack is that it almost functions like a chatroom. This makes it more convenient and feel more organized than simply cc’ing all of your colleagues on an email. It also has a much more elegant and sophisticated user experience than email. Using Slack can be ideal to help you to manage your teams remotely. Once you start using it, this may just become one of your favorite business tools.

7. HKTDC Mobile

Developed by the Hong Kong Trade and Development Council, this app provides important information needed by international vendors and buyers alike. It contains details about potential business connections, sourcing information, international market data, and more.

You never know what key piece of information will be able to help you establish an important client relationship or find a market opportunity. This app can give you access to the most important information you would need to do so, and can set you on your way to success.

8. RingCentral

RingCentral can be a real life saver when it comes to international calling. With this app, you can make U.S. calls and receive all of your voicemails completely for free as long as you are connected to Wi-Fi. So, if you know that you will have to be making a lot of international calls, or listening to voicemails, then this app can potentially save you the bother of paying for international roaming or getting a new plan while abroad.

9. Expensify

Business expenses are very important to keep track of so you can take advantage of all potential tax deductions and know how much you need to budget for these types of expenses in the future. Nobody wants to dig for receipts months later or incur the wrath of their finance department, so it’s important to find a way to track business expenses as they’re incurred.

Expensify makes it easy and convenient to keep track of your business expenses. Not only are they all listed in one place, but you can add them on the go – no more waiting to get back to your computer to update a spreadsheet. It even gives you the power to organize your business expenses based on specific categories, making it easier than ever to track your spending.

10. Business Behavior – The International Guide

Every nation has a different culture, and a different set of policies and guidelines for appropriate business behavior. When you are travelling abroad to meet with business contacts in a foreign country, the last thing you want to do is accidentally offend someone and potentially risk a fruitful business relationship.

With this handy guide, you can quickly research the etiquette recommendations for the nation that you are in. Then you can apply them to your situation and make sure that you are always behaving in a way that is culturally appropriate and respectful. This can go a long way towards improving your business relationships with overseas contacts and secure deals for your company.

The post Top 10 mobile apps that can help you manage your global business appeared first on Trade Ready.

Before you go online too hastily, there are instances when it pays to have a human professional translate your document or website. And there are also instances when you need a machine and a human working together. So how do you know when is which? Ask yourself these questions:

Question #1: How confidential is your information?

If the answer is even just a little bit, go human. In order to improve the future translations their tools provide, machine translators like Bing and Google Translate keep what you put into their sites. So you shouldn’t use the service for anything you don’t want competitors or the general public to see. Since your information stays on their servers, it could potentially be accessed by others. Confidential or proprietary communications—such as contracts or private client communications—should never be run through the machine translation.

Question #2: Is it important to get the translation right?

If there’s a lot riding on this document, go human. If it’s something casual that won’t affect business to a great degree, go machine. Machine translators are great for a one-off or for quick casual emails, but they are not a reliable tool for important international business communications or for legally-binding documents. While machine translation is much better than its reputation leads many to believe, tools like Google Translate are at best 70 percent effective. This means there will be errors in the translation you get back. The question is, are errors okay? Even Google Inc. itself does not use Google Translate for its most important corporate translations, opting to work with professional translation companies instead.

Question #3: Do you need a complete, full understanding or just to know the gist?

Machine translation is a great resource for discrete business use. It can be very helpful if you receive a customer email in a foreign language that you feel is not confidential communication. It can give you a general sense of the subject of the email and whether or not you should invest in professional translation for it or similar documents. Machine translation is also great for stand-alone words or phrases.

Question #4: Do you need it back immediately?

This is an area in which machine translation comes in especially handy. The trick is to balance time concerns with any confidentiality or quality considerations you may have. This is when professional, paid machine translation—as opposed to a free tool like Google Translate—is useful. Many top-line translation companies offer a mix of human and machine translation that our industry calls machine translation post-editing (MT+PE). If you require a real-time, on-demand solution that balances time with quality, this may be the way to go since MT+PE blends advanced machine-technology and human translation to enable speed and improve quality. Working with a private MT engine, as opposed to free ones online, will also ensure your competitors don’t see your translations.

Translation companies—or the good ones at least—are like any other strategic sales partner your company has. Your translation provider should ask about your larger goals and how your current project fits into those goals.

Be wary of any translator—machine or human—that doesn’t add value to your larger communication strategy.

Be even more careful, though, of any partner that blindly dismisses the use of machine translation technology. Even though it’s not perfect, it does have its place. You have to leverage technology to stay ahead of your competitors; your translation partner should as well.

The true danger is using either a machine or a human translator blindly, without thinking about what kind of results you want or what kind of results you’re going to get. Translation done correctly is not a cost center; it’s a profit driver. And just as with any other aspect of your business, you have to ask the right questions in order to get the right returns.

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