This is to let you know about some support available for Cornish companies from UKTI (UK Trade and Investment) to translate the text of your web site, in order to market more effectively to potential customers overseas.
If you are interested in selling to foreign language markets, there are more advantages than you might think.
In addition to just being available to be searched and read by more people, there is an interesting benefit in search engines. The largest part of the Internet is written English. This means there is less competition for phrases in other languages. So if you find it hard to rank top for a phrase like “Hotel Cornwall” in Google, there is yet hope for easier top rankings for “Gasthaus Cornwall”, or “Pensione Cornwall”. (Search numbers will be lower, but if you are top, the visitors are still coming to you).
In this interesting report by Unesco (on their openSource TYPO3 web site) we can see that there is something like 50% of the competition for the same phrase in French, and less than 15% of competition for the top spot in Spanish. Meaning your site is easier to rank top in those languages than it is in English.
| Indicators for languages in the Internet - 2007 | ||||||||
| EN | SP | FR | IT | PO | RO | GE | CAT | Total |
| Speakers (millons) | ||||||||
| 670 | 400 | 130 | 60 | 205 | 30 | 120 | 9 | 66,074 |
| Speakers as % of world population | ||||||||
| 10.10% | 6.10% | 2.00% | 0.90% | 3.10% | 0.50% | 1.80% | 0.10% | |
| Internet users in a given language (millions) | ||||||||
| 366 | 102 | 58 | 31 | 47 | 5 | 59 | 2 | |
| Internet users in % of speakers | ||||||||
| 54.60% | 25.40% | 44.90% | 52.30% | 23.10% | 16.50% | 49.10% | 23.10% | 17.5% |
| Internet users in % of world population | ||||||||
| 5.50% | 1.50% | 0.90% | 0.50% | 0.70% | 0.10% | 0.90% | 0.00% | 17.5% |
| % internet users per language | ||||||||
| 32% | 9% | 5% | 3% | 4% | 0% | 5% | 0.20% | |
| % web per language | ||||||||
| 45.00% | 3.80% | 4.40% | 2.70% | 1.40% | 0.30% | 5.90% | 0.10% | 100% |
| Ling. Productivity per language | ||||||||
| 1.42 | 0.43 | 0.87 | 0.98 | 0.34 | 0.66 | 1.16 | 0.74 | 1 |
| web pages per internet users in a given language | ||||||||
| 4.44 | 0.63 | 2.24 | 2.93 | 0.45 | 0.62 | 3.25 | 0.96 | |
The red line is the most interesting from the perspective of this article, as it shows one aspect of the effective competiton for the top slot in Google. You can see that with 4.4% of the web written in French and 45% in English, it follows that it will be 10 times more difficult to get on page 1 of google in English. We won't even start on the various language versions of Google (google.fr, google.de, google.es), that can be the topic for another day.
The last line is also useful, as it shows the relationship between the number of web pages and users in each language. Clearly the amount of content per user in user in Spanish, Romanian or Polish is very low - as is Catalan! Italian French and German are still considerably less competitive than English - which is the hardest language in which to reach the top of Google. By comparison the other languages represent easier pickings.
Needless to say we can both analyse the main search phrases that will work for your business in any language, and easily add multi-language functionality to your web site - should you achieve support with the translations from UKTI. Have a look at the very simple multi-language functionality we added to this site quite a while ago: http://www.neuteboom.it
Even without the support of free translations it may well be an investment worth making for those wishing to market worldwide.
Google and other services also offer automated translation services, but I am informed by better linguists than myself that these can be pretty poor, potentially inaccurate, and may not always give the impression that you would want.
If you are a Cornish company and want to find out more you can call UKTI (UK Trade and Investment) on 0845 6060969 to find out if you are eligible for support with translations.
And give us a call here at Channel if you would like help with the technical half of the solution.
Pierre will be proud of me!
