Do You Have An International Audience Visiting Your Website?
October 5, 2009 by Pablo Palatnik
If you are in the business of online retail and ship to other countries than the United States, you know the variables that go into customers abroad. Shipping methods, etc, one big key element of that difference between a domestic and international customer is language.
Sure, if you have a website right now with customers from all over the world, you are selling to these customers such as in the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Brazil, etc. The question if you should be asking yourself is if they understand the website better, meaning if it was in their native language, would I have better conversions? Would this customer that speaks much better, let’s say Portuguese, feel more comfortable if my site was in their language?
Many companies do seek a translation company to translate their website and build a whole new page with their page in secondary languages. Google has just released a widget that can make this way easier to the customer. In the click of a buttom, this widget will turn the website to the language of your choice.
Google tells all about this widget in their new blog post, as they state, “Today, we’re happy to announce a new website translator gadget powered by Google Translate that enables you to make your site’s content available in 51 languages. Now, when people visit your page, if their language (as determined by their browser settings) is different than the language of your page, they’ll be prompted to automatically translate the page into their own language. If the visitor’s language is the same as the language of your page, no translation banner will appear.”
All this takes a simple piece of code to put into your website. You can find it now in the Google Website Translator.
As a tip for those of you who deal with international customers and have experienced issues in your customer service department with customers (potential and current) sending emails in other languages other than English and your customer service reps dont speak that language, try to Google Translate tool.
