Missing Out on Non-English Speaking Potential Customers

In this day and age in which we live – when technology allows even the smallest company to expand into a global marketplace – it’s more important than ever to reach out to potential customers around the world, no matter what language they may speak. Although we may try to convince ourselves otherwise, the whole world does not speak English. The fact is that some of the largest overseas markets are non-English speaking, and you’ll never reach that market unless you do what’s necessary to communicate the importance of your products/services to those customers. That means ensuring that your website and everything else connected to your brand are multilingual. And if you don’t take steps now to accomplish that goal, you and your company could very well be missing out on exponential growth possibilities.

If you have any doubts about that, just consider the advantages of conducting multilingual e-commerce:

• Increase your sales – The easier your website is to understand and navigate for potential customers, the longer they are likely to stay. And the longer they stay, the more likely they are to buy your product or service.
• Increase your customer base – Once you translate your website, advertising, and everything else connected to your brand, you’ll realize that there is – quite literally — a whole world full of potential customers available to you.
• Increase your SEO – Multilingual e-commerce sites achieve a higher ranking on search engines outside the U.S. than those sites that offer content in English only.
• Increase the quality of customer relations – Providing customers with a multilingual site allows you to provide much better customer service to new and existing customers. But equally important is the impact that better customer relations will have on your company overall, including improving your reputation. A better reputation means more customer loyalty, and more customer loyalty means more repeat customers, an increase in the number of new customers, and a brighter future for your organization overall.

Now that we’ve established the importance of having a multilingual website and brand, let’s move on to some practical advice on how to achieve that. First things first: contact a reputable translation company and hire them to do the job. Whatever you do, never rely on machine translation. While some of the translation apps/software are adequate for smaller, non-business-related tasks, the success of your global audience reach will depend on services that can only be provided by trained, professional linguists. Here are a few reasons why that’s true:

• Fluency – When it comes to securing the highest quality translation services possible for your company, nothing compares to a native speaker. Only a person who has grown up speaking the language can have a true grasp on the nuances of vocabulary, grammar, usage, and modern jargon needed to effectively reach your target audience. And the best way to find qualified native-speaking linguists is through a translation company.
• Localization – A high quality translation involves much more than simply converting one language to another. It also requires a knowledge of the culture, historical, political and religious background of your target audience. You may not realize how much all that plays into how we view the world on a day-to-day basis, but it has an enormous influence. The same is true for people from other parts of the world. That’s what localization is all about – the process of ensuring that all aspects of a translation are suitable and appropriate for the audience. That includes not only language, but concepts and images as well. Your professional translator also needs to be a localization expert.
• Transcreation – There’s translating, there’s creation, and then there’s transcreation. As the term implies, this involves adapting content – including websites, advertising, marketing collateral, packaging, company slogan, etc. – that is just as appropriate and appealing to the target audience as it is here in this country. That involves not only translation and localization skills, but also the creativity required to adapt existing marketing concepts in whatever way necessary to develop a strategy that is successful with a non-English-speaking audience.

Now is not the time to wait or miss out on all the advantages that come with becoming a multilingual company in the global marketplace! Start that journey today by contacting an experienced, reputable translation company.

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