Why You Should Translate Your Website

There is no doubt that English has become the predominant language of business. In fact, English accounts for nearly 23% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). According to Ethnologue, there are roughly 370 million native speakers of English and close to 980 million speakers of English as a second or foreign language. Given those numbers, you may think that it is not worth the expense of professional website translations. However, that is false. So, this week, we are going to explain why you should translate your website and where to start.

Why You Should Translate Your Website

While English may be the unrivaled champion of the language of business, that does not usually cross over to the language of buyers. In fact, with the world population now standing at about 7.7 million, the number of native English speakers in the world (see above) represents a miniscule percentage.

According to research from the Common Sense Advisory – a management consulting agency that specializes in the language industry — 72.1% of consumers spend most or all of their time online searching for content in their native languages. Moreover, a staggering 72.4% of the consumers surveyed indicated that they would rather purchase a product based on information in their native language.

Not to mention, 56.2% of consumers stated that being able to read product information in their own language is an even more important factor than price. Clearly, if you are selling products or services overseas, there is a compelling need to translate your website (or, in language industry parlance, localization) into the languages of any international markets in which you want to sell.

Website Translations for a Domestic Audience

Even if you do business only in the United States, where the predominant language is English, there is a significant minority of non-English and Limited English Proficient (LEP) speakers. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, there are roughly 67.3 million people in the United States who speak a language other than English at home. This represents nearly 22% of the U.S. population and is growing rapidly, doubling since 1990. Of those, 25.6 million reported to the Census Bureau that they are LEP.

However, it is important to remember that consumers prefer buying products and services in their native language, so a U.S. business’ target market is not only non-English or LEP speakers, but all people whose native language is not English, even if they speak English “very well.” In other words, this is a large potential market right here in the U.S.

Among the languages in the U.S. that have more than a million speakers (other than English) include Spanish (41.5 million), Chinese (3.5 million), Tagalog (1.8 million), Vietnamese (1.5 million), Arabic (1.3 million), French (1.2 million), and Korean (1.1 million). Some of the fastest growing languages in the U.S. between 2010 and 2018 are Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Tagalog (spoken in the Philippines), Telugu (spoken in India), Vietnamese, Bengali (spoken in Bangladesh and India), Portuguese, and Tamil (spoken in both India and Sri Lanka).

Where to Start When Translating (Localizing) your Website?

Now that we know the reasons why you should translate your website, we need to think about where to start. First of all, you need to decide into which language(s) you want to translate or localize your website. Domestically, this depends on where your business is located as well as the communities you want to reach. You can refer to the lists above to determine what are the most widely spoken foreign languages in the U.S. or contact us here at Translation Source and we can help you to figure out a plan!

If you are looking to expand into international markets, some of the top business languages (other than English) include Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, French, Japanese, Hindi/Urdu, German, Russian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, and Italian.

Once you have settled on your new target market(s) and language(s), you will need to find a language service provider (LSP) that can assist you with your website translations. The first step would be to send the source files for your website (e.g., HTML, XML, etc.) to an LSP to receive a quote. Be sure to provide them with any additional details, such as whether any graphics or multimedia content should also be localized.

For example, if you have videos on your website, do you also want voiceover into another language or subtitles? You also need to consider other issues such as currency conversion if you have an online store, modifying date/time formats, ensuring that any design or color themes will not be accidentally offensive in the target culture, and even Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in the target language.

The scope of localization services (and the cost) depends on what you want to do and what internal capabilities you already have. Do you have website developers that can handle the back-end work on the website to incorporate the translated content? If you need more advanced technical assistance, it is vital that you work with a reputable, professional LSP that specializes in localization services.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you now know a little more about website translations, why you should translate your website, and where to start. At Translation Source, we have a team of localization engineers that can help you throughout the entire localization and website translation process. From the initial analysis and quote through the full translation, desktop publishing, coding, and post-localization quality assurance (QA), our professional localization project managers are there to guide you every step of the way. Finally, when your website translations are complete, we will even stick with you to assist with any website updates, related foreign language marketing content, SEO, cultural consulting, and even social media translation, localization, and transcreation (cultural adaptation) services.

If you would like to learn more about how Translation Source’s website translation and localization services, please email us at info@translation-source.com or call us toll-free at (800) 413-7838 to speak with one of our expert localization project managers.