Companies have long used English language websites to serve a global audience, but as the number of internet users approaches five billion, are thing starting to change?
The internet was created in English. The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), which is widely described as the precursor to the internet, was developed by the US military and the world wide web that we browse today was created by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. These were systems devised by English speakers and their native tongues, and most of the coding and scripting languages used to create and display websites and web apps, such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP, are still based on English words and the Latin alphabet because of this history.
Whilst the backbone and underlying technologies of the internet were devised and general built in English does not mean the content we consume should necessarily also be so. Languages enhance human interactions and different languages have evolved to reflect the culture and ideas of those that speak them. And while English may be the most widely understood language, the majority of internet users speak a different language at home.
In the late 1990s, researchers found that around 80 per cent of online content was publish in English. Today, however, that figure has fallen to under 50 per cent with the smartphone revolution making transforming the internet from a Western-focused technology into the global infrastructure it has become.
English remains the language of global business
There is no doubt that the dominance of the British Empire and America over the last century has made English the ‘lingua franca’ of business around the world and the continued number of online English teacher jobs is testament to that dominance. However, for businesses to connect with consumers around the world, they need to do better than make their products and services understandable – they need a more local touch.
People have a deeper trust in services offered in their own language and in today’s global online marketplace businesses must cater to all their customers, and that means offering their products and services in the languages their markets demand.
Chinese is currently the second-most widely used language online, which is little surprise given the country’s 1.4 billion population has been rapidly modernising and moving online. Spanish is third, and Arabic is fourth and growing at a rapid pace.
The declining dominance of English online is perhaps best demonstrated by social media. Chine and India, both with populations well over a billion, currently lead the world in social media usage and neither country has English as the dominant language. Recent studies suggest that more than half of all Twitter posts are written in languages other than English already, with Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese and Indonesian becoming increasingly popular languages on the platform. And China has it’s own social networks like Weibo, where Chinese is almost universal.
Local is important for sales
The internet is global, but it can be difficult for companies to maintain multiple translations of their websites. However, studies have shown that if a company wants to break into a market, then they will need to provide their website in that language to be a real success.
According to a 2014 survey by Common Sense Advisory of over 3,000 people across ten countries, 75 per cent of people are more likely to buy in their native language. And over half of respondents (56%) either “spend more time on sites in their own language than they do in English-or boycott English-language URLs altogether”.
People like to support local businesses and workers over multi-national conglomerates, and a website only in English demonstrates to potential customers that their language, culture, and country is an after-thought. They may have done research to show that most of the people in their target market can understand English, but by failing to translate the site into the local language they miss the fact that forcing people to speak a foreign language could be considered an insult and result in the boycotts found by the CSA study.
These ideas are not just found in emerging markets either. Despite the EU’s single market creating a unified marketplace for goods and services, a 2011 study fund that the vast majority of people (90%) still choose to buy goods and services provided in their own language and 40 per cent of people reported that they never buy products or services in another language.
Conclusion
English does remain the lingua franca of the internet. It is the language to which people turn when they both have different mother tongues as it is widely understood and therefore remains the language of business. However, for any company that wants to be taken seriously on the global stage then it is critical that they translate their website into the languages of their target markets if they wish to succeed. Ignoring other languages means missing out on sales and alienating new potential customers.