As of today, there is approximately 70 million people online in Europe who do not speak English or is not native English speaking. So its up to you to do the calculations. So what I did was to build a software solution for web-site publication in more than one language. The principle is simple - let the visitor select the language. Make your website available to the local visitors by adapting it to the local visitors habits and preferences.
Research shows that people prefer using their local search-engine.
That is why Yahoo, AltaVista and the others are getting local. And when getting local - you need to speak the tongue. Again, translate your website to make it possible for your visitors to find you among the billions of pages out there. Even a blind man see that this is more expensive then just keeping the old simple one-language page. Kai Roer is the founder of Roer.