If you’re a business in the UK, you might not feel the need to translate your website into any other language. After all, English is now the most spoken language in the world with an estimated 1,132 million speakers around the globe https://blog.busuu.com/most-spoken-languages-in-the-world. However, it turns out that keeping your website monolingual could actually be seriously harming its growth and receptivity with target audiences.
Here are just 3 reasons.
Cultural expansion
The world is far from being a single culture. By translating your website into multiple languages – even other Eurocentric languages such as French or Spanish – you’re expanding the number of cultural groups that can browse your services or items. This is likely to drive a boost in sales and customer engagement, resulting in a long-term profit.
Embracing diversity
If the younger generations have shown us anything, it’s that the future is full of diversity with little room for intolerance or narrow-mindedness. By tailoring your website to suit multiple languages, you’re setting your business up to have a reputation of respectfulness, modernity, and inclusiveness. Many browsers will opt for sites that demonstrate these traits as opposed to those that don’t – again, driving sales and improving your chances of customer loyalty and retention.
Maximising trust
If you offer a particular item or service, it’s not unfeasible that someone without English as their first language will buy or invest in it. However, their trust in what you offer is likely to be very diminished as they’re only seeing part of the whole picture – this could be worry over shipping costs, whether the item is true to size or anything else similar. By enabling internet users around the world to know the true extent of what your business offers, you’re maximising the trust that they have in you and what you can do for them. This again is likely to boost sales and overall satisfaction around your business.
Overall, the world is a changing place. More and more people are welcoming the inclusion of cultures and languages outside of their own, and businesses should be doing the same. Make sure you stay in the present day by adapting your website to be multilingual.
