We have already talked in previous posts about the risks of thinking that your employees can do the job of professional translators and whether it is better to hire the services of a professional translator or use an automatic translator. However, there is another question we need to ask before having that discussion, which is: does my company really need to translate anything at all?
Why waste time and money translating into more languages if we already have our website in English? To consider this issue we have gone back to theForrester Researchreport from a few years ago, which could have been written only yesterday. What this report tells us is that selling in the language spoken by our customers is always the best option, but we can look at some figures that help us understand why this is true.
According to Forrester Research, 80% of consumers expect to be served in their own language, and not only that, they will not buy a product if it does not have all the important information translated into their language. In addition, half of all consumers are willing to pay more if everything related to the product they are buying is in their language. For example, only 7% of Chinese people and 5% of Japanese people feel comfortable buying in another language.
Online information
The report also gives us some figures for the digital environment. Potential customers are more suspicious if the online information about a company is not in English. It has also been demonstrated that visitorsto a website stay for twice as long if the page is in their language, making it more likely that they will buy something.
In fact, half of all consumers only buy from websitesin their own language. In short, what the report tells us is that if the information is translated,the customer feels more comfortable and this will improve the success of the products. If the buyer understands what they are buying, there is a better chance that they will like the product or service, feel satisfied and repeat their purchase or experience.
Moreover, if we translate our website, we can increase our market since we have access to more customers. It will also improve our image, since customers will feel that we are closer to them and this will increase their confidence in our products. “But in my company, we have nothing to translateapart from the website”.Are you sure? We will talk about this at a later date and see what you think then.
