I have a software company that markets only to english language
websites. I suspect I could increase my sales significantly if I
translated my website and software into another language. I'm just not
sure which language to begin with. My typical customer is a busy
free-play game website or a small online casino. My main product is
bingo but I have about 5 other multiplayer games as well. Which
language would be my best bet, and why?

Hi! Thanks for the question.

I suggest that you may approach it in two ways. One way and probably
the more applicable one is to look at the type of internet users. In
this survey the percentages of the top 5 Internet users speaking a
language other than are the following:

Chinese ? 14.1%
Japanese ? 9.6%
Spanish ? 9%
German ? 7.3%
Korean ? 4.1%

?Global Internet Statistics (by Language)?
http://global-reach.biz/globstats/index.php3 


Another supplementary article as regards to foreign language speakers
in US can be of help to you as well.

Spanish - 26.7 Million 
Chinese - 2.0 Million 
Czech - 1.45 Million 
French - 1.4 Million 
German - 1.2 Million

?Global Internet Statistics: Sources & References?
http://www.global-reach.biz/globstats/refs.php3


Finally you can also take this conservatively and take on the figure
of most widely spoken languages in the world irregardless of the data
on internet access.

1. Chinese
2. English
3. Hindustani
4. Spanish
5. Russian

?Most Widely Spoken Languages in the World?
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775272.html


Taking everything into account, it seems that the Chinese language
will be your best bet. It reflects strongly among world language
speakers, global internet users and US based web subscribers. Spanish
is a good feature also. You cannot also count out Korean because of
the great number of net users there.

Search terms used:
most languages spoken internet users

I hope these links would help you in your research. Before rating this
answer, please ask for a clarification if you have a question or if
you would need further information.
                 
Thanks for visiting us.                
                 
Regards,                 
Easterangel-ga                 
Google Answers Researcher

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Request for Answer Clarification by picaroon-ga on 04 Apr 2004 05:01 PDT

A very good answer, and the comments from others are right on the
money too. This is a great service!  I'm still not entirely sure which
statistics to use though. As a B2B company, should I be more concerned
with the number of foreign language USERS for each language, or the
number of WEBPAGES in each language (the websites are essentially my
customers). Looking at the data from one of your links, the
distribution of WEBPAGES by language is:

    Japanese 5.9% 
    German 5.8% 
    Chinese 3.9% 
    French 3.0% 
    Spanish 2.4% 

This puts Japanese and German first. I also need to consider which
demographic enjoys playing games online more. Ie, if I could get a
breakdown of foreign language game sites or casinos by language, that
would be golden and worth a tip :)

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Clarification of Answer by easterangel-ga on 04 Apr 2004 05:41 PDT

Hi again!

Thanks for the kind words. Based on the original question, I have
already answered your query.

I tried to find much more information but I couldn't find anything
specific to game or casino sites. You might want to post this as a new
question so that other researchers might take a crack at it. However
these further findings might be of interest to you as well.

A rather dated study can be found here about percentages of personal
web pages in foreign languages. You might still want to use this as an
additional measure to your study.

"A Comparative Study of Personal Web Pages"
http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:bO-zmIitqKwJ:www.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/~ishii/IAMCR2000.pdf+percentage+chinese+japanese+web+pages&hl=en&ie=UTF-8


One aspect of your business that will be of importance will be broadband users.

"In terms of subscriber numbers, China overtook Japan at the end of
last year with nearly 11 million users, while Japan came a close
second with 10.2 million, according to research conducted by analyst
group Point Topic with the DSL Forum."

"But the figures for number of DSL subscribers per 100 phone lines
tell a different story, with China managing just 5.1, Japan ahead with
14.4 and broadband flagship South Korea notching up a whopping 27.7.
In terms of percentage growth, China lagged again, with Portugal more
than doubling its DSL take-up in the second half of 2003."

"And while the UK came in a tenth in terms of DSL subscriber numbers,
with 1.8 million, the British shouldn't feel too bad, given that the
UK is big on broadband via cable - which is not counted in these
figures - and no country bigger than the UK is growing faster than
it."

"China takes broadband crown from Japan"
http://www.silicon.com/networks/broadband/0,39024661,39119231,00.htm

 
I hope these resources would be of help to you.

Thanks!

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Clarification of Answer by easterangel-ga on 04 Apr 2004 05:45 PDT

As regard to your question whether you should concentrate on the
number of foreign language USERS for each language, or the number of
WEBPAGES in each language, I think that although you're customer are
the webpages. The reason for this is that the eventual user (or end
user) are the foreign language users. So in my opinion it will be of
better service to your clients to show the language capabilities you
have in your service since they (your clients) maybe targeting other
users from different countries as well.

If you are in the Western Hemisphere, especially the U.S., Spanish
should be your first choice.

Well, My first best bet would be Chinese. Over 1,200,000,000 people
are literate in that language. Then, I would put out Spanish. Over
330,000,000 people are literate in that language. I hope that this
helps your question.

Chinese and Spanish are great suggestions BUT ...

It's not the language base that's important but the percentage that
own (or have access to) computers AND their interest in accessing an
English-language based site.

How would they ever get to hear about it?

And is the perceived market already being addressed?

A further confounding factor is Foreign Exchange considerations.

In the 'Western World' we now take facilities such as Credit Cards and
Paypal for granted.

But do the prospective foreign-language customers have acceptable
mechanisms that will allow them to transfer funds to Hard Currency
service providers?

One note on Japanese.  Although it seems like a good choice, most
educated Japanese with computers likely know English, so that should
not be high on your list.

Thanks for the 5 stars and for the tip! :)

One small advice.. before you go all out converting your content to
different languages, I would suggest do a test run with
http://babelfish.altavista.com/, it is free and it offers all
mentioned languages :)

If you see people going for translated version.. then hit the hammer
and invest money in getting graphics and text changed to different
languages

Machine translations are very poor and will send people away laughing.

Should there be a consideration about the restrictions placed on
internet access from China itself?  I thought the government censored
a lot of stuff.

It that's the case, then that 1 billion of so would come down
significantly in terms of the number of users that are permitted to
access websites...especially gaming ones.

I am surprised that no one has told this guy to translate his site and
software into norwegian languages mainly catering to swedish, denmark
and norway.

These visitors are the largest chunk on visitors on the web and occupy
the spots of 1,2 and 3 respectively in global internet users. Also
most companies operating on those countries have been earning at par
or even more than american companies.