With today’s expectation for companies to be able to reach consumers around the world, language barriers have become a hurdle that organizations need to be able to overcome. 

Data transliteration tools are designed to tackle this potential problem by working to convert fields or characters from one alphabet into another without maintaining the underlying meaning of the words, focusing solely on the characters themselves. 

This process is especially important when it comes to verifying customer addresses. It looks at addresses of any language, parses them, and standardizes them so that they can be read correctly and businesses will be able to properly service foreign customers. 

Unlike data translation, which takes the intended meaning of the words into account, the process of transliteration works to provide the most accurate customer address information, when it is being shifted from one language to another. 

Additionally, according to data company Melissa, around 20% of addresses entered online contain errors, whether that be spelling mistakes, wrong house numbers, incorrect postal codes, or formatting errors that don’t comply with the correct postal regulations.

Issues like this can result in a loss of revenue and an overall damage to customer relationships due to late or undeliverable shipments.

With Melissa’s Global Address Verification service, addresses for more than 240 countries and territories can be verified at the point of entry as well as in batch in order to be sure that only the correct billing and shipping addresses are captured and used in systems.

Additionally, transliteration and language support is available for several languages, including Cyrillic, Hellenic, Hebrew, Arabic, Kanji, Chinese, Hangul, and Thai.

With this service, users are enabled to transliterate addresses to and from native country languages and Latin. 

On top of this, customers gain access to a postal certified address engine that utilizes official government data including CASS (USPS), SERP (Canada Post), PAF (Royal Mail) and others. 

The address verification service also offers the ability to correct international addresses by adding in components that may have been missing such as postal codes, locality, and more as well as the ability to standardize addresses in order to meet local in-country formatting parameters. 

Lastly, this service allows users to add precise latitude and longitude coordinates up to the rooftop (delivery point) level.

Melissa also offers a Data Quality Suite that works to verify, standardize, and transliterate addresses from several countries.

With this, users are enabled to 

  • Use intelligent recognition in order to identify over 650,000 ethnically-diverse first & last names
  • Authenticate phone numbers, geo-data, and be sure mobile numbers are accurate and able to be called 
  • Validate domain, syntax, spelling, and test SMTP for global email verification

To learn more about the Data Quality Suite, visit the website. For information on Melissa’s Address Verification service, click here.