Translating your Web site to another language may not be necessary because 74 percent of the Internet is in English. Spanish and German each make up 10 percent and French makes up 6 percent, Cano said. But if your target market is Latin America, it s critical. Translated Web sites should be updated constantly, and inquiries in the foreign language need to be answered. Business owners have to decide whether to maintain entirely separate sites for each language or have just one site with several languages.
Cultural differences can make a multilingual site impractical.
You wouldn t, for example, advertise a Thanksgiving sale in Spain, points out Ulrich Henes, president of the Localization Institute in Wisconsin. The institute is planning to hold seminars on creating global Web sites. If you don t want to manage your own global Web site, Global Reach in Paris, France will do it for you. The company is the only one in the world that markets businesses internationally on the Web, according to managing director Bill Dunlap. The company can also alter your site to make it more likely to appear in the top domestic search engines, Dunlap says.