The success of your company’s website will be determined by the number of people it can attract and retain. That means you should ensure high quality content that is in tune with your product(s)/service(s) and useful to potential customers. But what if you’ve got it all in place, but your prospective customer does not understand your language? The answer is quite obvious, irrespective of whether the potential customer requires your product, he or she will not spend a second more on your website.
The consequences are fairly obvious. You might have the opinion, like lots of people in our English speaking world that a majority of online transactions are done by people who are conversant in the English language. If you believe that then you are in for a rude shock. In reality, the opposite is true. I will present you with a small example, consider this – the USA has 28 million Spanish speakers. And right now I am talking about internal customers of a country who do not speak the language it is identified with.
Get the drift? If you are heavily dependent on international transactions, many of which take place online, it would be prudent for you to get language translation services for your website and get the content translated into the local languages of your potential customers in various countries. On the other hand, even if you are not dependent on international customers, unless you are living in a small country with very little diversity in culture and languages, you would be better of researching the demographic profile of your country and getting your website translation done accordingly.
