Today, we live in a globalising world and we can see and experience that almost everywhere we go, whether it’s in our personal or professional life.

In the business world, you might think that the process of globalisation is perhaps most important and favourable for larger organisations and businesses which already have an established international position and are recognised across the world. This however, isn’t necessarily the case – in the digital era, small businesses can compete with giants much more fairly than it had place in the past.

There are, of course, obstacles a SME will have to conquer in order to reach new, international audience and customers. A recent survey reported that “75 percent of Internet users prefer not to make important purchasing decisions unless the information about the product is presented in their native language.” That’s a truly astonishing number especially if taking into the account that over 70% of all internet users do not speak English as their first language! A number of business owners decide not to translate their marketing material, for example websites, as they strongly believe that the return on investment isn’t great and so they make a decision to invest the founds elsewhere.

Given the above statistics, it’s truly quite difficult to understand why so many companies, even from the Fortune 500, do not have a multilingual website available. Part of the problem could perhaps be the perception that finding and working with a professional translation agency can be somewhat difficult and expensive. This isn’t true however and a number of agencies offering translation services explain the translation process step-by-step, helping business owners to see the tangible benefits of translating their material, whether it’s a website, marketing material or even legal documents.

Due to the growth of internet use around the world, companies can now trade without limits across boarders and target audience previously unreachable, in practically every corner of the world. Translating your company’s material will also automatically and subconsciously show the client that you are in fact a professional company and that you provide a great customer service, reaching out to them in order to improve and optimise the user experience regardless of their language preferences. This could consequently resolve in brand loyalty.

Another very important benefit of translating a website would be increasing your organic traffic from search engines such as Google. Professionally translated content attracts more people and consequently bring more business to your company.

As you can see the advantages of investing into translating your company’s material can be truly great and range from acquiring new customer to improved brand image. It is however extremely important that translation should always be completed by a professional agency, which will ensure accuracy and reliability. If completed for example a free translation software available on the internet, the consequences could be quite damaging to your brand, as no business owner would like their website to become the next internet sensation due to poor quality, mistakes or sentences that simply do not make sense.