Forum Moderators: not2easy
Anyways, it will cost, but no doubt it is valuable as a French resource on the web.
Not to go into depth about the demographics of my site blah blah.....the site gets 2500 visitors a day, and all is well.
It is education based, just to enlighten you a bit
Im just wondering what positive traits I will see on my site by providing content in different languages....ie more overall visitors, new opportunities etc etc. Im totally open ended in regards to possible replies, because Ive never even thought of providing content in another language
I know one negative, I will be of zero help for French feedback. But that aside, what should I expect? Is it worth it? What % of the online population can speak French. Info related to this topic area would be mucho appreciated by me, and no doubt others who have had similar thoughts, but never typed them into this box :)
One thing though: If the French don't know of your site they won't visit. You should consider french search engines - here's a start: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum18/184.htm [webmasterworld.com] ;)
Should I be looking up a french dictionary for "submit" ? :)
Looking at [fr.altavista.com...] I understand a little. Heini, im assuming you know a little french, but in the case of non-French speaking people like me, how would you suggest approaching submitting to these engines when you dont understand half of what is being said?
Is there something that can help me on my way in that respect
and after reading the first half of that thread, theres another 3 or 4 to further look into
seems like a major issue and one well worth investigating. I remember a while back mentioning I know a nice German girl my age, who with a little Scottish charm may offer me a German site too ;)
English, German, French. Sounds easy enough. :) My bro is also close friends with some people who speak fluent cantonese.
Apart from those, am I missing a major language? :)
I would advise this order
English
Spanish
German
French
Japanese
Traditional Chinese
Portuguese
Simplified Chinese
Russian
Korean
Italian
Dutch
Serbo Croat
Swedish
that should be a decent start :)
Could you put an approximate summary to those on the traffic volumes by language?
<url>http://www.ethnologue.com</url> will give you languages listed by number of speakers...there are plenty of other sites that have estimates of the percentage online in each country...I had a student use these to calculate online populations for each language
English 42%
Chinese 9,8%
Japanese 9,2%
Spanish 7,2 %
German 6,8%
Korean 4,4%
French 3,9%
Italian 3,6%
Portuguese 2,6
Dutch 2,1%
More languages and details available.
This does of course not say much about possible traffic from those languages. Measurement of online population is a vague matter in itself.
If anyone has a multilingual global site and would like to share approximate stats on traffic to those languages, it may turn out to be an eye opener.
English
Spanish 22119 (29924)
French 20126 (20802)
German 13904 (16448)
Dutch 10430 (10607)
Portuguese 7871 (7871)
Arabic 5359 (6048)
Danish 5565 (5642)
Chinese 2919 (2983)
Finnish 2393 (2393)
Hungarian, Russian and Japanese are too new to have sensible figures...Swahili, Bengali and Hindi have not yet gone live
bear in mind that these figures also reflect my own language skills as much as the potential audience...I speak French and have some grasp of Spanish, Dutch, Danish and Portuguese...my predeccessor was fluent in German and Arabic
I know you have done a good job promoting the site here, and if done well you can have a fair share of your visitors from Denmark. I see that Danish is not under your advice, well that makes a bit of sense though ;)
It depends so much on the sites content and its cultural appeal and I agree that online population is not the whole truth. Monthly searches in a particular language is the important thing to me.
Japanese and Chinese will eventually be major factors...I just find both difficult to promote
the two fastest growing languages seem to be Arabic and Portuguese...both grow rapidly and consistently whether or not I make any effort at promotion
DOH!
Hmm - this is almost for sure a sign of something going wrong. How come non english speakers go to your english pages in the first place? Is the navigation between the languages prominent enough?
People preferring a online translation to pages in their language? Hard to imagine.
There are other issues to bear in mind - the level of promotion, the site domain chosen (as it's a .co.uk) will tend to force people to select the language for the country. Additionally, a .co.uk may be automatically filtered from other search services.
Remember, this is only one site and an actual pattern on the site.
One site is in 5 languages.
Last three months (pages viewed):
English: 56,1%
German: 17,7%
French: 11,8 %
Danish: 9,0 %
Japanese 5,4 %
It was the cheapest way to increase visitors!
I suggest to everybody to have multilingual pages.
It is very easy to be in the top position in the French market and not so difficult in the German market.
Interesting, thanks for sharing that information.
Can you tell us, do you know what percentage of visitors use the English and browse through a translator?
I 'think' germany have a larger population on-line than Spain.
If I'm not mistaken.....
But I don't know for sure.
Globalreach estimates native spanish speakers online at 35-40 Mill. So the majority lives in Latin America and the USA.
On second thoughts.... under the Dutch.
I got interested when there where something like 800,000 Spanish and 2.5 million Germans on-line. I seem to recall something like 1.3 million for England?
About 4 - 5 years ago? Bin a lot of ¡puters sold here in Spain in the last couple of years, like every where, I guess.
I try to bear this in mind when I build my site (aimed at largely retired or 'about to' types)
Don't mean to sound like a carnivore here.. LOL:)
Very few visitors used the translator option (mostly using Google language option): some of them translated in an existent language!! Other visitors translated from English to Spanish.
