The translation of your company’s website should be a central part of your marketing strategy.

If you already know that website translation is important and want a quote for the service our number can be found on the right hand side of this page. If you are still not convinced that the majority of e-commerce transactions happen in non-English speaking regions and to benefit from this your website should be translated, then please read on.

Why Should I Translate my Website?

By translating your website you immediately open it up to millions of people who use the internet every day all over the world that do not speak English.

Even for the home market your website should be translated in order to reach everyone. Did you know that there are over 28 million native Spanish speakers in the USA or 6 million people living in the UK that were not born there. As the home markets become more diverse many businesses are finding new niche markets that they can sell to. For instance banks in the UK are targetting the growing Polish population.

The online population of the internet in 2007 was 1.3 billion people. We have broken this data down into regions, shown in the graph below. The data collected from www.internetworldstats.com.

The data shows that at least 82% of all internet traffic is happening outside of the USA, the largest English speaking market. To put this data into the context of this article we'll use it to calculate the number of people who are interacting with the internet in a language other than English.

Internet Language Use

If we assume that 90% of people in English speaking countries speak English (this is a safe assumption given the Spanish speaking population in the US and the economic migration in the UK). Then the formula to calculate the total number of internet users that do not speak English is as follows.

1.3 billion – ((USA + Canada + UK + Aus/ZY) *.9 ) = Total Non-English Internet users

Which gives us 1.05 billion people that used the internet in 2007 who cannot understand English.

This figure will be dramatically higher over the next number of years as internet use in all markets outside of the USA is growing at over 200% since 2000 (the Middle East is actually close to a 1000% in that time frame).

We estimate that in 2008 there will be an additional 282 million new internet users outside of the English speaking regions, that breaks down to 770,000 new potential customers a day that don't use English. Add this to the 1 billion people already there and you can start to see the real size of this opportunity.

In Short

Why should you translate your website? Think about it…

• If people cannot read your website they cannot buy your products. Would you buy a product or service from someone if you couldn’t read what it did?
• If people cannot read your support material they will return your products for reasons that could have been fixed. For instance it might be as easy to check an online FAQ to see if the installation error has a work around on a particular operating system. This is also true for your in-country resellers of your products or services, they will need some sort of linguistic support.
• What are internet users in Non-English speaking regions typing into Google? There were 750 million unique searches using Google in August 2007, two thirds of these from outside the USA. If your content isn’t in the language used to conduct the search how will the person searching for it be able to find it?
• By translating your website you will increase your potential customer base by 1 billion people. That’s a thousand million people (3 times the population of the USA) that interact with the internet in a language other than English. This figure increases by 770,000 new people every day.

Which Languages to Support

According to The World Bank the largest economies in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are as follows (highest first);

United States, Japan, Germany, China, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada, Spain and Brazil.

They constitute over 70% of the world's economy (which is $33 trillion combined) consuming the majority of world's products and services.

If you want to communicate with the people that live in these countries you need to do so in the following languages;

US English, Japanese, Germany, Mandarin, Cantonese, UK English, French, Italian, Canadian French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.

This is a very quick take on what to translate if budget constaints are in place and broadly speaking you are looking at a world market to target your products or services to.

More in-depth analysis is available from K International on specific regions. Specific regions can be analysied and market niches discovered allowing you closer communication with your customer base.

Talk to K International about your global website strategies on 01908 572600, email info@k-international.com or use our contact page, we are here to help you with your website translation.

Need More Information?

More web related information can be found on the links below.

Web Design. An overview of our web design services.

Web Accessibility. A guideline making sure that your site will perform correctly in all markets.

Web Localisation. A more technical article about the logistics of making your website available in different languages.

Web Translation Guide. A list of the common errors (and work-arounds) that people make when translating their website.