Trading globally is crucial for all industries. Mastering the local language is always a key for success for any companies. According to the most recent EuroBarometer report, English is significantly less popular than we would like to believe. For example, it is the second language of only 39 percent of the French population. In Italy, this figure is just shy of 35 percent, and in Spain it is less than 23 percent. These numbers wouldn’t be that alarming if these weren’t the ‘English-loving’ countries. The situation gets drastically worse when we take emerging markets into account: only 5.2 percent of people in Russia speak English fluently; 5 percent in Brazil; and less than 0.75 percent in China.
When you take into consideration the fact that the combined population of these three countries is over 1.7 billion, it becomes obvious that not translating your content can cost your business an absolute fortune. It is also a mistake that your competitors may already be avoiding. Major companies such as Banca Intesa, Saxo Bank, MetaQuote and FXCM realised how big of an opportunity comes with translated content and started using HQ Language Services years ago. No organisation has the luxury of passing up on the potential that reaching such a large market can bring.
The average number of languages companies want their content translated into is 12, and the most popular ones are Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, Polish, Indonesian and Malay. These languages offer the most options because of the huge populations that use them. However, our clients state that a big portion of their income comes from countries like Sweden, Norway and Italy, so they make sure their content is translated into these languages as well.
