Did you know that:
- Businesses are 3 times as likely to buy when addressed in their native tongue.
- Customer service costs are considerably reduced when instructions are provided in the user’s native language.
- Visitors stay twice as long on websites with content in their native tongues.
- High quality translations enhance your company’s brand image while low quality translations do more harm to a brand’s image than no translation at all.
- Translation Memory tools help reduce translation costs by up to 70%
(data by Forrester Research) - It is estimated that around £30 billion worth of business is lost by companies every year, because potential clients are put off by poor spelling and grammar on websites.
- Addressing your potential international customers in their native language maximises your marketing efforts and gives expression to your company’s open-mindedness towards other cultures.
According to a study published by Global Reach, English speakers currently account for 35.80 percent of the world’s online population, and non-English speakers account for 64.20 percent. But, by the year 2005, the percentage of English users online is expected to drop to less than 25 percent.
Currently, less than 15% of all companies present on the Web offer more than one language, a majority of corporate sites offering only English.
These data are in sharp contrast with the linguistic reality sketched below.
20 most spoken languages
| 1 | Chinese | 885,000,000 | 11 | French | 70,000,000 |
| 2 | English | 350,000,000 | 12 | Punjabi | 70,000,000 |
| 3 | Spanish | 250,000,000 | 13 | Javan | 65,000,000 |
| 4 | Hindi | 200,000,000 | 14 | Bihari | 65,000,000 |
| 5 | Arabic | 150,000,000 | 15 | Italian | 60,000,000 |
| 6 | Bengali | 150,000,000 | 16 | Korean | 60,000,000 |
| 7 | Russian | 150,000,000 | 17 | Telegu | 55,000,000 |
| 8 | Portuguese | 135,000,000 | 18 | Tamil | 55,000,000 |
| 9 | Japanese | 120,000,000 | 19 | Marathi | 50,000,000 |
| 10 | German | 100,000,000 | 20 | Vietnamese | 50,000,000 |
