Multilingual website

[EmmaB21]

Hi all,

I'm new, and I wanted to ask people involved in small businesses how important they think trying to sell internationally could be to the success of their business if they had the means of doing it.

I'm considering having my website translated to try and attract traffic from other countries. Has anyone done it? Has anyone considered it and not done it for a particular reason?

Any views appreciated :)

[Brian Altenhofel]

What kind of business are you in? If you're doing business internationally, are you serving businesses or consumers? Do you have people able to serve leads or customers in all of the languages that you plan to support?

If this is a B2B business, then English is likely sufficient. English is the international language of commerce.

If this is a B2C business, then you need to know what languages your target markets speak, and you need the ability to serve those customers just as well as you serve your English speaking customers.

Don't try to shortcut it through Google Translate or other online translators. You need a person who is both fluent in that language and familiar with those cultures to do the translation. Otherwise, your "translated" content could easily be saying something that you don't intend.

Depending on what markets you are targeting, you may even need to present different designs for your website for different regions due to cultural differences in how certain imagery is perceived or the need to support both LTR and RTL layouts.

And of course, you'll want to be using a CMS that has native support for multilingual content.

[Harold Mansfield]

I agree with Brian. If you have (or can put together) the customer service and infrastructure to service people in other languages, go for it.
But it won't go well if you shortcut it and just plop up a roughly translated website.

[KristineS]

Definitely agree with what the others have said. If you're going to try and service a market where English is not the first language you have to have native speakers on staff who can help when necessary. The industry we work in has a percentage of business owners who speak Spanish. We have Spanish speaking staff in our California plant partly for that reason. When customer service catches a call, we can transfer to them if the caller speaks Spanish more fluently than English.

[vangogh]

I agree as well about not skimping on the translation. Take something you've written and put it through an online translator to whatever language you choose and then translate it back to English. You can see how much gets lost in translation.

What you might do is pick one country where you think you might sell well and translate things into the language of that country, which like will work in multiple countries and expand from there. Maybe track analytics on your site to see which countries visit most frequently and translate for them one at a time.

[billbenson]

Also, remember if you are B2B, English is the language of business. Spanish, French, and Portuguese are the other languages that come to mind in that order of priority. Sure you will get calls from people that don't speak English, but they are generally end users, not buyers.

On edit: I suspect it's going to be expensive to have a multilingual website. An international company I know does a redirect for the international websites. The products are different though, and so not to much dup content. Also they are a multinational manufacturer.

Not knowing what you do, I'm not sure this is worth it for you.

[HooktoWin]

Hi all,

I'm new, and I wanted to ask people involved in small businesses how important they think trying to sell internationally could be to the success of their business if they had the means of doing it.

I'm considering having my website translated to try and attract traffic from other countries. Has anyone done it? Has anyone considered it and not done it for a particular reason?

Any views appreciated :)


Hi EmmaB21,

Sounds like you're thinking of branching out, congrats! :)

When it comes to international sales there's a few things that need to be considered; here's a short list.


Etiquette: A friend in South America mentioned they offended people when they asked directly for what they wanted (e.g. would you please give me....) instead of leading with (I'd appreciate it if you could...).
Language: Idioms and metaphors don't usually translate well so you'd need to account for that in your marketing, sales and customer service. Naturally, this requires more time, money and resources.
Relationship: Many, many cultures expect that you'll establish a genuine relationship with them before business is discussed. This can be difficult for those of us with western sensibilities, but for them it's a necessity.
Timing: Some countries expect their vendors to provide them with a product and leave them alone, while others expect you to offer extended support/hand holding after the sale.

Here's an example: Some of the true stories we share in our website mini-courses are provocative. They're appealing to most of our audience. People from Denmark? They hate it. It offends them for for a few reasons I won't go into here. Naturally, they don't buy much from us. So we've made a conscious decision to let that slide for now since it's not a market we're targeting actively.

This isn't a comprehensive list but, if the core elements of selling internationally are handled it can be fantastic.
It all starts with your six honest serving men (http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_serving.htm).


who are you targeting?
what kind of customers are they?
what do they want?
how do they want to be served?
why should they listen to you?
when should they take action?
where do they go to get started?

Hope this helps,

Andrew

[Dragon]

You can provide several languages on site. It's depend from traffic. There are most popular languages are Spanish, China, Japan, Germany, French, Arabic, Russian.

[99social]

If you decide to go that route, bring on someone fluent in those languages to rework your website's copy. Google Translate and other auto-translators can absolutely butcher your sales copy and leave you looking really unprofessional.

[turboguy]

Depending on what you are selling it might also be important to have someone who understands the industry. I have seen some cases where they had someone do the translation who knew the language but not the industry terminology and chose words that we not at all correct.

I can recall a long time ago seeing a very nice 4 color brochure done by a danish company for a fertilizer spreader. Sorta like the little Scott's spreaders you push around your yard to apply fertilizer or seed except bigger for farm tractors. They had a nice big title calling it a "Manure Spreader" Well manure is fertilizer but if you put it in one of those it would never have worked and would have made a stinky mess but even worse someone looking for a fertilizer spreader would have been turned off by the bad choice of titles.

[ramz]

I think it's a good idea to let the user communicate with your companies in their own language. More costumers will be attracted and perhaps you'll find great success in a specific country. It's no hard to find employees who speaks natively other languages.

[Dragon]

You can contact with special companies which specialize is multi languages translators. Or find freelancers for saving money.

[washington79]

I second Brian. Being able to reach out to your non-English speaking clients is the foundation of your business. Invest in making the information and translation on your website close to perfection. Make sure that you have at least support person or a bilingual person who could speak two or more languages (would be more affordable for you) who can accommodate your customers. Your social media pages set up for this should also be in the language of your target markets. Complicated, takes a lot of effort, but if this is your passion, I'm sure that you'd succeed with the right strategy and tools. Always make sure that your customer is satisfied with the infos on your site and the support from your end, without any language barrier/miscommunication.

[billbenson]

This one is a big 'depends'. If your site is B2B I wouldn't bother with foreign languages. I spent 10 plus years as a sales guy covering Latin America and the Caribbean. English is the language of business. Most of the people I met with spoke fluent English, Most got their degrees in the US. Of course this relates to Latin America. I would think Europe would be the same for the most part. A French site, if you do business in France might be different. Spanish, don't bother. To many different dialects. Curse words in one country may be completely acceptable in others.

The only companies I have seen with multilingual websites are very large companies. I represent one. They were recently sold for $3.5 Billion.

Now if your market is B2C things could be quite different. You aren't dealing with professionals in most cases.