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From my logs, the .co.uk site is visited by most asian countries, in which we have gained customers. However I am thinking towards maybe one or two .com's writing in Asian languages.
Does Anyone know what the most pervasive language is in that area ? i.e what is a safe bet for a good coverage that would be better than all other options.
I am looking towards:
China
India (not so important, as a very high percentage of internet users are english speaking - scream if you know better).
Thailand
Malaysia
Japan
etc.
Any help would be welcomed.
Very easily within the next couple of years we could see Chinese as the dominant language of the region on the net. Right now it's Japanese and English.
never thought of Taiwan, Korea or Hong Kong.
| Country | Online Population | Country Population | % Online |
| Japan | 38,640,000 | 126,549,976 | 31% |
| China | 22,500,000 | 1,261,832,482 | 2% |
| Korea South | 16,400,000 | 47,470,969 | 35% |
| Australia | 8,420,000 | 19,169,083 | 44% |
| Taiwan | 6,400,000 | 22,191,087 | 29% |
| India | 4,500,000 | 1,014,003,817 | 0% |
| Hong Kong | 3,460,000 | 7,116,302 | 49% |
| Singapore | 1,850,000 | 4,151,264 | 45% |
| Malaysia | 1,500,000 | 21,793,293 | 7% |
| New Zealand | 1,490,000 | 3,819,762 | 39% |
| Pakistan | 1,200,000 | 141,553,775 | 1% |
| Israel | 1,000,000 | 5,842,454 | 17% |
| Thailand | 1,000,000 | 61,230,874 | 2% |
| Philippines | 500,000 | 81,159,644 | 1% |
| United Arab Emirates | 400,000 | 2,369,153 | 17% |
| Saudi Arabia | 300,000 | 22,023,506 | 1% |
| Lebanon | 227,500 | 3,578,036 | 6% |
| Kuwait | 100,000 | 1,973,572 | 5% |
| Vietnam | 100,000 | 78,773,873 | 0% |
| Iran | 100,000 | 65,619,636 | 0% |
| Jordan | 87,500 | 4,998,564 | 2% |
| Kazakhstan | 70,000 | 16,733,227 | 0% |
| Sri Lanka | 65,000 | 19,238,575 | 0% |
| Oman | 50,000 | 2,533,389 | 2% |
| Qatar | 45,000 | 744,483 | 6% |
| Bahrain | 37,500 | 634,137 | 6% |
| Nepal | 35,000 | 24,702,119 | 0% |
| Bangladesh | 30,000 | 129,194,224 | 0% |
| Palestine | 23,520 | ? | ? |
| Syria | 20,000 | 16,305,659 | 0% |
| Yemen | 12,000 | 17,479,206 | 0% |
| Kyrgyzstan | 10,000 | 4,685,230 | 0% |
| Uzbekistan | 7,500 | 24,755,519 | 0% |
| Fiji | 7,500 | 832,494 | 1% |
| New Caledonia | 5,000 | 201,816 | 2% |
| French Polynesia | 5,000 | 249,110 | 2% |
| Guam | 5,000 | 154,623 | 3% |
| Brunei Darussalam | 4,000 | 336,376 | 1% |
| Mongolia | 3,000 | 2,650,952 | 0% |
| Solomon Islands | 3,000 | 466,194 | 1% |
| Vanuatu | 3,000 | 189,618 | 2% |
| Maldives | 2,000 | 301,475 | 1% |
| Laos | 2,000 | 5,497,459 | 0% |
| Micronesia, Federated States of | 2,000 | 133,144 | 2% |
| Papua New Guinea | 2,000 | 4,926,984 | 0% |
| Turkmenistan | 2,000 | 4,518,268 | 0% |
| Kiribati | 1,000 | 91,985 | 1% |
| Tonga | 1,000 | 102,321 | 1% |
| Myanmar (Burma) | 500 | 41,734,853 | 0% |
| Bhutan | 500 | 2,005,222 | 0% |
| Marshall Islands | 500 | 68,126 | 1% |
Great info, i think Chinese is a very good option, not sure about Japanese, as the product fields manufacturers are mostly from Japan, so i think the market is already saturated with suppliers.
South Korean figures, i found intreging, does any other nation use Korean ?
Middle East countries are a bit dodgy, because of trade embargoes on industrial parts, so will leave dealing with that.
>Chinese is a very good option
just get your payment options well organised...
>Japanese- already saturated with suppliers.
>Middle East - trade embargoes
there are so many variable arn't there. Hadn't though of embargos.
>does any other nation use Korean ?
not to my knowledge. Wonderful country to visit BTW.
Onya
Woz
...not sure about Japanese, as the product fields manufacturers are mostly from Japan, so i think the market is already saturated with suppliersDon't give up too easily. There may be lots of Japanese suppliers, but are these same suppliers very internet savvy? More particularly, do they have good SEO? Do they even know what SEO is? In most cases the answer to that is no. You may do well going head-to-head with the locals if you can offer better price or service.
India...English is the dominant language on the web...but as a medium term goal adding Hindi, Bengali and Tamil to the mix might be very good PR
Japan...go for it...remember to use shift-xjis encoding rather than Unicode...it seems to be very much the dominant way of representing Japanese
Chinese...a minefield...you'll possibly need to look at separate ways of doing the site for the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan...but it has got to be an obvious high priority
Arabic...I'd say go for it anyway...we get superb traffic to our Arabic site with releatively little effort...mostly from Egypt, Saudi and the Emirates...all of which should be OK...we see no traffic from Iraq and little from Afghanistan
Thai...I haven't looked at yet
Indonesia...likewise, but we are getting trafic from Indonesia to our Dutch site so Sumatran may become a priority language soon
Korean...will be in next year's priority list
Only Mainland China can read simplified characters. All other countries with a Chinese population read traditional characters, including Hong Kong.
I would certainly place much higher priority on Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Singapore and Malaysia can essentially be discounted - as both countries have a very high English literacy rate. So your main targets will be China, Taiwan and Hong Kong - and depending on your product and your target market, you may be able to get by with only the traditional (Big-5) Chinese characters.
As for Thailand, I highly recommend a translation to Thai if you need to reach this market. However, a large proportion of the upper-class will either be able to handle English or Chinese.
As for India - I'm not so sure that translation into the local lingua is necessary, as those who have money can certainly read English.
Too early to focus on Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam - Burma as well but they can read English - and the Vietnamese are fairly literate reading French.
My only other suggestion is the world's second most populous country - Indonesia, for which you will require Bahasa Indonesia (also shared by Malaysia and Singapore as a second language with slight differences). But again, if you are trying to reach people with money, the great majority of the upper class will almost certainly read Chinese and/or English.
Israelis are fairly literate when it comes to English - so Hebrew is necessary only if you are trying to reach a large market.
And Arabic may be a consideration but keep in mind that there are many restrictions on Internet access in these countries - and as such you may find you're not reaching anyone. Plus, depending on the product, you may not be able to sell to them anyhow.
I forgot about Traditional vs Simple Chinese. Doh!
Excellent information all around. Indonesia is a very good idea. Hove you or anyone else had any success with Indonesia?
Onya
Woz
I honestly do not see significant value in using Bahasa unless you are going to market an everyday product or service.
I run a gambling portal - and as I do not particularly wish to reach the low-end clientele, I think Chinese, Hanggul (Korean) and Japanese should be more than sufficient.
I've got it listed as one of the highest priorities in the next round of languages we add...pretty much neck and neck with Italian
I was going to ask Woz what had happened to the 227m population of Indonesia on your table ! (Also, you might want to check the pops of Bangladesh & Pakistan :))
"not good trying to sell Jaguar Cars to Joe Bloggs in China or Vietnam, they simply don't have the money"
Don't forget that China, India and Indonesia have a combined population of 2.4 BILLION people. Even a small percentage of a large number is still a large number. I am in Indonesia, and the number of Mercs and BMW's is astounding.
"My only other suggestion is the world's second most populous country - Indonesia, for which you will require Bahasa Indonesia (also shared by Malaysia and Singapore as a second language with slight differences). But again, if you are trying to reach people with money, the great majority of the upper class will almost certainly read Chinese and/or English"
True, except that during the Soeharto era all forms of non Bahasa Indonesia language (except English) were banned. They are now exploding, but many Chinese are still in the habit of expecting communications to be in Bahasa Indonesia and will be tuned into this form. Everybody speaks Bahasa Indonesia.
As a relevant issue, Bahasa Indonesia is a roman character based language, so any translation/localization would be easier to implement than Chinese.
"Excellent information all around. Indonesia is a very good idea. Hove you or anyone else had any success with Indonesia?"
Indonesia is really beginning to explode. Well worth the effort, but then I'm biased :)
TC
English is still the business language in Asia. Many business managers now have been educated in the West and in some Asian countries English is widely spoken. In Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan and China (the largest and most potential markets) it is used less, especially among higher decision makers. Also remember that business is used to translating English for documents seen as important in these East Asian countries.
But English is widely used in Singapore, Hong Kong (SAR), Philippines, Malaysia and India though the former are smaller markets. India cant be ignored as the second most populous nation in the world with a strong IT base. English Used, but less so among business people in Indonesia (mainly Jakarta), Thailand (mainly Bangkok).
This summary is strictly for b-b. For consumer or mass markets you are right.. you need local languages. There is a lot of great info in this thread.
Key problem is the telco infrastructure where dial up access is relatively expensive and fairly unreliable.
Thanks for joining in the discussion and thanks for the information regarding Indonesia.
>I am in Indonesia, and the number of Mercs and BMW's is astounding.
Yes I agree that a lot of people in the so call developing countries do have the money. When I was living in Shenzhen, China, the garage underneath our apartment block was about 75% Mercs! Er, we were in the 25%.
Even then, everything is relative. We drove a Honda Accord which in Shenzhen was an "OK" car. We drove to Guilin for a holiday and the locals there were astounded that we would drive "such a good car" all that way. Also, we had friends in Beijing who were multi multi multi millionaires (US$) and a Jaguar was the cheapest car they owned.
I guess my point is that there are millions more people in these countries who cannot afford expensive cars than those who can. And yet they all need to brush their teeth every morning. I would rather have a thriving business selling millions of tubes of toothpaste than gamble on selling one luxury car.
I am talking extremes of course and with online business in the developing countries we would indeed be communicating with and selling to the companies or demographic classes who have the money to access the internet and so hopefully have the money to spend. Still, I'd rather be sure of selling at least some tubes of toothpaste than maybe sell a car.
>I was going to ask Woz what had happened to the 227m population of Indonesia on your table ! (Also, you might want to check the pops of Bangladesh & Pakistan )
Indonesia - Ooops! I'll fix that. All the population figues are taken from the CIA World Book, but I will check Pakistan and Bangladesh as well. thanks for that.
Onya
Woz
TC
So :-
low-end & volume - local lingo
high-end & margin - perhaps N/A
(Whilst living in Shangai, I really wanted to get into the bicycle bell and lights selling business :))
TC
Ha! Couldn't have said it better myself.
Onya TC
Woz
Back to topic.
Although in this era of Globalization, we supposedly find ourselves in a global marketplace, we still need to walk down the aisles and look for the stalls that most apply to us. So, of course Asia is a big market that will only be ignored at peril but you could not hope to cover the whole region effectively with one or two languages. Each country needs its own approach to language, culture and style. Even countries that essentially are served by the same language (China & Taiwan) will require very different approaches.
So, IMHO, pick a COUNTRY or set of countries to aim for - based on your particular product or service - and then target each with the language written for their particular culture and style. If you get business from other markets that share the commonality of language, so much the better, but if you try to serve all you'll end up satisfying none.
TC
My understanding of Indonesia is that perhaps 95% of all large businesses are owned by Chinese - like Thailand, although of course they will always deny it.
Would you say that, assuming the target market is the upper 1-2% of the population, that Chinese would be sufficient?
The reason for this is that some products need to be very highly targeted in order to get the best advertising rates. I don't see the point in using the most common language if 98% of the population are not going to buy my product or service - and thus my advertisers' products or services. Which in turn drags down the CTR to a level where you have no choice but to sell your advertising cheaper.
Would be good to have an opinion on that. In Thailand, while nearly all large businesses are Chinese-owned, they all read/write Thai as well. But I suspect that a good percentage of this population will be able to read Chinese, and perhaps English - and thus Thai is only necessary when trying to reach a more general market.
I guess there are a number of issues to think about on this subject.
Firstly, sector is important. The Chinese are strong in the retail sector. This is heavily populated by Chinese that regularly communicate in Chinese. In other sectors such as Agricultural industry, traditional pribumi Indonesians are more prevalent.
When it comes to advertising, the medium is important. For TV, Bahasa Indonesia and English would be the target languages. You rarely see any Chinese language on TV here. For print, Chinese is now much more common than before and would be a possibility.
I still think, however, that many of the Chinese target market to which you refer would still feel uncomfortable in reading a Chinese language magazine or newspaper openly. History has taught them that. I am actually not even sure whether they would all read and write Chinese but actually doubt it. But they do all speak Bahasa Indonesia and most English.
So, if it's just the top 1-2% that you are after, Bahasa Indonesia and English would be the languages (IMHO) but the trick would be to pick the medium to narrow down to that target.
(For info, Advertising spend in Indonesia this year is predicted to be US$827m, 62% of which will be TV)
TC
As for reading Chinese in public, I'd have to agree with you there. But in the privacy of their own homes I would think Chinese would be the predominant language.
