Multilingual localization service WOVN partners with Recruit ahead of 2020 Tokyo Olympics

Tokyo-based startup Minimal Technologies today announced that it has secured a business partnership with Recruit, the Japanese web services conglomerate best known for its eponymous job placement service. Recruit will use the startup’s WOVN.io multilingual website localization service in a bid to attract more non-Japanese visitors to its sites ahead of the international tourism influx that will be created by the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The alliance with Recruit is sure to raise the domestic profile of WOVN, launched in June 2014. As Minimal Technologies co-founder Jeff Sandford explains, Recruit’s adoption of the service will likely entice others to follow.

“If a large company in Japan is not using your service, it’s very hard to get other large companies to take the plunge,” Sandford explains. “Having Recruit show their confidence in us will be great for getting other large corporations to use WOVN as well, and that will lead to other smaller companies utilizing our service.”

Recruit will roll out WOVN widgets, capable of translating websites into the top 27 most popular languages on the web, across 12 of its domains to start with. Additional Recruit sites will receive the service down the road.

See: WOVN.io isn’t a translation service, it’s a multilingual localization service packed into one line of code

Unique URLs

In addition to its new business alliance, Minimal Technologies is also releasing a beta of its backend service WOVN++ today. WOVN is currently a Javascript frontend code, hidden in a website’s HTML header. The backend version will improve SEO results for multi-language searches, as it creates a small library on the server and switches the language before it goes to the browser itself.

If your website (say example.com) is in English but you want to offer Japanese, you can have WOVN++ automatically generate unique URLs ( ja.example.com or example.com/ja). This way, search engines can pick up on the translated language – not just the original.

“We can make a lot of choices for you, as there’s a lot of busywork that we can take care of – that’s our focus in everything we’re creating,” Sandford says. “Changing paths and subdomains usually requires new routing inside the application, but WOVN++ stays outside of the application server as much as possible, and it doesn’t change your code.”

For enterprise users who want to have complete control over their own data, WOVN++ also allows them to host the translated content on their own servers instead of the startup’s. Both WOVN and WOVN++ have free and paid tiers, but Sandford hints that the latter may become a premium-only service in the future.

Between October 2014 and now, WOVN’s total user base has grown from 1,000 to more than 4,500. Minimal Technologies raised 31 million yen (US$250,000) from Incubate Fund over two seed funding rounds last spring and summer.