Website Translation
In 2009 only about 35% of the Internet population speaked english, this yields a rather obvious fact yet still overlooked by too many website owners: your english-only website is not reaching 2/3 of the Internet population out there.
Looking at the numbers carefully, one can only arrive at the conclusion that this number is oonly going to increase, for the english speaking countries are reaching a saturation point in the Internet access market (everyone's on the Internet in english speaking countries) while developing countries are still joining the net. It is reasonable to asume by looking at the numbers that by 2015 the english population of the internet which once where more than half, could only represent as little as 20% or less.
 Percentage of Internet users by Country |
 Total number of Internet users by Country |
In terms of purchasing power and economic weight, translating your website into just 4 languages: Spanish, German, Chinese and Japanese would get you acces to 35.4% of the worlds GDP. With China's economy alone growing at a double digit percentage even though this time of crisis.
Advantages of Translating your Website
Building a multilingual website helps build your company's credibility even with old customers that wont directly benefit of you going abroad. It is a sign of growth, of maturity, it says "We Are Growing, We Are Getting Bigger" which is what happens when you go to a completely new market and start doing business there.
Outside the seven countries where English is native, there is no form of marketing in any country that happens in English. If someone doesn't believe this, they should visit Europe, Asia or South America. People live their life in their own language, and your marketing better follow, whether the media is newspaper/magazine ads/articles, radio/TV, billboards... or Websites.
Why is Website Translation Important?
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Over 100 million people access the Internet in a language other than English |
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Over 50% of web users speak a native language other than English |
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Web users are four times more likely to purchase from a site that communicates in the customer's language |
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Visitors stay for twice as long on native language content sites |
Talk to the Economic Dragon in his Language
We at Tranxlatium do agree with all the economists who think that the buying power is shifting thanks to the global crisis that we are living now. China, India and Brazil are the three big winner of this crisis and their buying power cannot be any longer ignored in a global context. In other words, Internet business that do not take China, India and Brazil into consideration by translating their websites are 'opting-out' of the next economic model.
China has been growing at an average of 8% for the past 30 years, even having a growth rate over 10% for several years. It is the second economy and the biggest export power in the world. According to the World Economic Forum, Brazil was the top country in upward evolution of competitiveness in 2009, gaining eight positions among other countries, overcoming Russia for the first time, and partially closing the competitiveness gap with India and China. It's also the largest economy in South America and one of the top growing economies in the world, surpassing Russian in total GDP in 2009.
A Winning and Cost Efficient Strategy For New Markets
A multilingual website helps to expand the business into other markets and to create brand awareness. We have also help some companies to create a cost efficient internet expasion strategy. First we would set mirror localized versions of the main website into a handful of potential languages. At this stage we only translate informational pages, there is no service support yet and potential customers are redirected to the main site. This creates a brand awareness in the target language / country / market and at the same time it helps evaluate the interest of that market in a company product or services. After some time, we come back to evaluate the experience, and we do a full website translation and localization, with sales and customer support backend for the markets that now we know have shown an interest in the brand. This strategy has saved thousands for our clients in the past. Localizing websites has to do as much with understanding the web as it has with languages.
