YNOT EUROPE – Most people access the internet in their native language. Even if they can speak other languages, they are likely to prefer accessing internet information in their mother tongue. When a company decides to translate its website, it must carefully choose which languages it will concentrate on to allow target customers to access the site successfully.

How do you determine which languages are most important to your website’s visitors?

The first place to start looking for an answer is to examine the top languages used by people accessing the internet as a whole. According to Internet World Stats, the most commonly used internet language is English — 27 percent of all users worldwide prefer to access the internet in English. The next most-used language is Chinese, with 23 percent of users preferring that language. Spanish is next with 8 percent, followed by Japanese and Portuguese. Spots 6 through 10 are occupied by German, Arabic, French, Russian and Korean.

So, if your website is only in English now, you can increase access to 50 percent of all internet users by only translating your site into Chinese. Adding Spanish to your site will get you to 58 percent of all users, and so on.

However, this is not the whole story. Web managers also should compare the worldwide internet language information with their company’s marketing plans. It is important to know which countries the company already is targeting with their products or services and which countries they are planning to target in the near future.

For example, if the company does business only in North America and Europe and its site is currently in English, Chinese may not be a good choice for translation. The majority of the Chinese-speaking population of the world is located in China, and China is not among the markets where the company wishes to acquire new customers. Although there are Chinese-speaking users outside of China who prefer to use Chinese on the internet, they are not abundant. Therefore, the company would be better off starting with English and Spanish. They may have to adjust the Spanish to suit North American-based and European-based customers, though, and the Spanish spoken in Spain and the Spanish spoken in North and South America differ in some ways.

It is also important to consider who will be able to access your website and what synergies you might be able to achieve with your existing operations if you translate your website. For example, a small company based in The Netherlands probably displays its main website in Dutch. A large portion of Belgium residents speaks Dutch, and the company may be operating in The Netherlands and Belgium currently. Looking at the Internet World Stats statistics discussed above, the obvious choice would be for this company to translate its site into English.

Despite the statistics, the company actually may be able to gain business with a minimum impact to their logistics area by translating their site into French instead. The other predominant language in Belgium is French. If the company operates in Belgium with Dutch-speaking customers, it might be relatively easy to add more French-speaking customers in Belgium to the already existing logistics network. The availability of a French translation naturally will lead to expansion into France. The company could look at adding English at a later date.

Every company’s circumstances, not to mention translation budgets, are different. The most important thing to remember is that most people access the internet in their native language. Once you accept this, then make sure you investigate your business and marketing plans as well as internet language statistics before choosing the languages for your website. Both pieces of information are crucial to making the best decision.

This article was contributed to YNOTEurope.com by TranslationsXXX, an adult website translation service employing certified translators in 30 languages.