Non-English speakers and English language queries

Question about use of English for searching, particularly in relation to B2

[running scared]

I am trying to establish what proportion of business professionals whose first language is not English, use English language queries when searching as part of their work.

If anybody could share experiences or point me in the right direction it would be very much appreciated. Has anybody seen any published research on this?

I have been trying to use the different regional versions of the Overture keyword tool but have little faith in the results I am getting (possibly due to matching issues)

[rencke]

I have never seen any statistics for this, but can at least give you a pointer:

Only 28% of all Europeans understand English. Even in the rich and highly developed west-European nations, this figure is not higher than 41%. English is more widely understood in the north and west than in the south and east. Younger people tend to understand English better than older.

In the Latin part of Europe, you can safely assume that even professionals will use their native language when searching.

[a2ztranslate]

one rather blunt method i have used before is to go to the admin on a PPC account and run a check for a particular keyphrase restricted by geographical location in english and the target language. so e.g. i test "campervan" and "wohnmobile" (and variations) on google PPC account restricted to Germany only, and then compare the traffic volume statistics. very "about" but it gives you some indication (and it is just about always over 80% in the target language).

[tofm2]

Hello

When beginning working on our european promotion site we were confronted to the same problem. We have solved it by accepting only english spoken or written contribution, despite all the translational software or service.

[edited by: Rumbas at 9:53 am (utc) on Aug. 29, 2007]
[edit reason] removed url as per TOS - thanks [/edit]

[Afilweb]

A lot of people in Spain , like me. Use english for his searches, the most of the content of Internet is in english. But for example, i dont speak english very well, now im learning to "speak" english in England/Bristol.. That is my example, there is a lot of people like me, and buys books in english but don't "speak" english. I Think that in Spain is a hight volume of people, and yes from his jobs.

There is some spanish guys using the free search engine script from links24h, you can see in the keywordresearch tool that people search directly in english sometimes..

[edited by: Rumbas at 9:24 pm (utc) on Sep. 5, 2007]
[edit reason] removed url as per TOS - thanks [/edit]