It may not come as a surprise that 63.5% of all websites are in English and yet for 74.1% of all internet users this is not their language. So the question is: are you serious about speaking your customers' language ?
What are the most common languages online?
Just over half of all website home pages are written in English with varying amounts of additional information in other languages. Other top languages are Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Persian, French, German and Japanese. What is much more interesting to note is that over time, the number of English language sites has been slowly declining while the number of non-English web pages is rapidly expanding. The use of English online increased by around 281 percent from 2001 to 2011, a lower rate of growth than that of Spanish (743 percent), Chinese (1,277 percent), Russian (1,826 percent) or Arabic (2,501 percent) over the same period.
If we specifically look at internet users by language then English at 25.9% is top closely followed by Chinese, Spanish and Arabic. For a lot of the world's population, English is the universal 2nd language, but not everyone and as time goes by, its infuence is becoming diminished as other cultures rise.
Our place in the world in 2023
In 2015, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union and that event took place just over 1 year ago. What was widely predicted and now confirmed is that the UK is perceived as far less important in the world than it likes to think it is. Don't get me wrong, i'm not trying to talk us down BUT other countries are now the big players in terms of financial services, manufacturing and so on.
My point in raising this is that for you, whether you are in tourism, manufacturing, food import/export or sales is that now you will have to work that much harder to win or do business with EU countires or the new power players in the world such as the BRIC nations, Brazil, Russia, India or China. And the best way to do this is to offer multilingual website to show that you are a global business that is serious about speaking your customers' language. Literally.
What is the best cms platform for a multilingual website ?
As a Web Designer, my preferred platform for building pretty much anything for the web is Joomla. There are many different content management systems to choose from and most are capable of being multilingual with the addition of plugins and extensions. Not so Joomla, which is built from the ground up to be Multilingual. So, if you need a multilingual solution, out of the box, then Joomla is by far the best platform to choose.
Translations
Here comes the REALLY important bit: do not use Google translate for re-writing your copy. You've invested time and money into creating a beautiful site with great images so don't blow it on the last hurdle by using machine translation. You can find native speakers probably within your neighbourhood or you can use a translation agency who only use native speakers. They charge standard rates per 1000 word typically so you will not find a great deal of variation wherever you go.
Lastly do not forget your SEO. Don't forget to translate your page titles and meta descriptions too and if you use an SEO agency make sure they can deal with those languages too.
