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Going multilingual - translating your web-site

If you are planning on selling to the European market, you will need to translate your web site into as many European languages as possible.

People prefer to visit web pages that include text in their own language. This is particularly true of people who are not fluent in the original language of your web site - and extremely true of people who can't read the language of your web site at all (a lot of native English speakers tend to forget that many people in the world are not fluent in English).
Translation into another language demonstrates you are serious about that market. This in turn is likely to result in prospective customers in that market having more trust in your company.
Translation into other languages will be necessary to be included in search engines for those countries. For example, if your web site has content in Spanish, you can get listed on Spanish language web sites. As a result, when Spaniards do searches for your products, they are more likely to find your product.

Which languages?

Clearly the most important languages for your web site will be those of your key markets. If, however, you are attempting to reach as much of Europe as possible*, then bear in mind that in the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Greece, English is widely spoken. Since these countries also have comparatively small populations, you could probably get by without translations into these languages.

This leaves French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese as probably the first languages to which you should translate your web pages. However, if you have a good product, then translating into other languages will likely pay off in terms of additional sales in that market.

Of course, translation is not the end of it. If you have web pages in, for example, Portuguese, you must expect to receive queries in Portuguese. And if you want to turn those queries into regular customers, then you must be able to respond in Portuguese.

It is also worth noting there are two approaches to multilingual web sites.

Translation: in this case, you simply translate every English page into the new language. As a result, you have identical web pages in each translated language. This approach is more cost effective than approach 2.
Unique web sites in each language: in this case you have a team for each language and they produce a similar web pages, with the similar content, structure, etc to the original language version of the web site. However, they are given freedom to product content suited to the target language and culture. Although this approach is perhaps more expensive than approach 1, it can produce better content in the new language as the web team can produce material ideally suited to their language and culture.

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