Can Translating Your Website Increase Your Business?

by Harish Kumaresh

If you have a global business, you probably already have an online presence by means of a website, a social networking profile, or something similar. Now, the Internet has users from all over the globe, and if you have noticed it on your website statistics, you know that many of these customers belong to countries that do not have English as their first language. Therefore, if your product or service can benefit these customers, you might want to consider presenting it to them in their native language. For example, a content-based website or a website that drives all of its revenue through advertisements and affiliate links should definitely be available in a number of languages. After all, “5 cool things you can do with your iPhone” would be just as interesting for an English-speaking individual as it would be to a Frenchman who doesn't speak English. In fact, not having such websites translated would be a bad strategic move on the part of their owners. Websites such as online retail stores; websites providing reviews of movies, restaurants, and hotels; and online tutorial-based websites can greatly benefit by getting their content translated and adding a new set of customers to their database. To give you an idea of how big this “new set” of customers is, here are some stats: as perInternet World stats, out of the top 20 Internet users, 17 countries are non-English speaking. Asia and Europe rank higher than North America when it comes to calculating Internet users in the world based on geographic regions. Although the Internet appears to be dominated by English-speaking users, you have millions of users who use other languages to surf the Internet. As per the Internet world stats, the top 3 languages used by users on the Internet are English, Chinese, and Spanish with Chinese and Spanish users totalling up to 384 million and 137 million respectively. These numbers are bound to further increase as Internet connectivity continues to improve all over the world. Even if you consider just Chinese and Spanish users, we're talking about over 500 million users you're ignoring by not translating your content. Would you really want to miss your share of this giant pie that's only growing bigger everyday? Of course, you can't translate your website in every language available out there. The best way to understand what languages you can cater to would be to see if your website receives good traffic from any particular country. Another way to look at it would be to see if there is demand for your product or service in any country other than yours. If that's the case, you can be sure there's a considerably large crowd waiting to get acquainted with you -- all you need is a good content translation and localization partner.