Why build a Multi-lingual Website?
Multi-lingual sites have become a critical part of an organization's web presence. Only 30% of internet users have English as their mother-tongue, and as new economies are booming, the numbers are rapidly changing. As the table below indicates, offering the top 4 languages to your site already doubles your potential audience. Adding six more languages boosts you up to 84% of the world's internet population.
Key benefits of a multi-lingual site
Some facts about the internet users:
- 70% of the European community cannot read English
- 87% of web users search the web primarily in their first language
- Users are 4 times more likely to buy when you present information in their language
- Over 60% of Spanish users search the web in Spanish exclusively
“The single greatest barrier to business success is the one erected by culture." - Edward T. Hall and Mildred Reed Hall
Key benefits of Nooku Content
Publishing online brings new challenges: keeping the translations up to date, dealing with the complex of structure of your site and avoid untranslated 'dead spots'.
This is where Nooku Content kicks in:
- Adds multi-lingual features to Joomla, the world's most popular Content Management System
- No separate user interface: translate content in the same screen as it was written
- Keep track of statistics and progress of all translations
- Great Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for localized search engines
Top Ten Internet Languages
| Internet users | Penetration (% of Population) | Estimate for world population | Languages as % of users | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| World total | 1,262,032,697 | 19.1% | 6,606,970,166 | 100.0% |
| English | 379,529,347 | 18.8% | 2,022,629,545 | 30.1% |
| Chinese | 184,901,513 | 13.6% | 1,356,701,170 | 14.7% |
| Spanish | 113,463,158 | 25.4% | 446,648,991 | 9.0% |
| Japanese | 87,540,000 | 68.7% | 127,433,494 | 6.9% |
| French | 63,761,141 | 15.6% | 407,819,872 | 5.1% |
| German | 61,912,361 | 64.2% | 96,403,511 | 4.9% |
| Portuguese | 50,828,760 | 21.4% | 237,003,607 | 4.0% |
| Arabic | 46,359,140 | 13.2% | 350,965,119 | 3.7% |
| Korean | 34,430,000 | 47.6% | 72,346,515 | 2.7% |
| Italian | 33,143,152 | 57.0% | 58,179,115 | 2.6% |
| Top ten languages | 1,055,868,527 | 20.4% | 5,176,129,939 | 83,7% |
| Rest of the Languages | 206,164,125 | 14.4% | 4,430,840,227 | 16.3% |
Source : Internet Top Ten Languages Usage Stats were updated on Nov. 30th 2007. The most recent Internet usage information comes from data published by Nielsen//NetRatings, International Telecommunications Union, and other reliable sources. The population information is from world-gazetteer.com.