Multilingual visitors: speaking your customers' language

I want to start with a couple from Munich.

They are planning a trip to Ireland. They have been before, a long weekend in Dublin about three years ago, and this time they want to see the south west properly. They have been reading about Kerry. They find you through a travel blog, and the photograph that made them click was a good one.

They land on your website.

And they spend about forty seconds on it before they click back and keep looking.

Forty seconds. That is a long time to be on a page you cannot read.

They fell in love with Kerry and nearly booked somewhere else, because they could not read your website.

Now, the word nearly is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Maybe they pushed on. Maybe their English was good enough and the pictures were strong enough that they stayed. Plenty do.

But the friction was there. And for every person who pushes through friction, there are several who do not.

Somewhere around a third of overseas visitors to this country come from places where English is not the first language. Germany and France are consistently among our biggest inbound markets. The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and increasingly further afield again. These are not marginal audiences. For a lot of businesses along the west coast, European visitors are the difference between a full season and a thin one.

And yet nearly every tourism website in Ireland is in English and nothing else.

Which means it is working perfectly well for visitors from English-speaking countries, and putting a wall in front of everybody else.

Here is the part that makes this worth real attention. I call it the invisible bounce.

When somebody arrives on your site, struggles with the language, and leaves, you learn nothing. Your analytics records a visitor who came and went. It does not tell you why. It does not tell you that they spent forty-five seconds trying to work out whether the price included the equipment, gave up, and booked with a crowd up the road whose website had a small German flag in the corner.

You cannot fix what you cannot see. And this one is completely invisible unless somebody points at it.

Now, before we go further, let me deal with a misconception, because I think it stops a lot of people before they start.

Multilingual does not have to mean expensive and complicated. There is a ladder here, and you can get real value from the bottom rung without ever committing to the top one.

The bottom rung is a translation button. It is free, it takes minutes to add, and it means nobody is ever completely locked out. Now, the translation will be imperfect, particularly with warm idiomatic writing, which is exactly the kind of writing this whole series has been encouraging you towards. Your best sentence may come out a bit mechanical in German. But mechanical and understood beats beautiful and unread.

The next rung up is proper human translation of your most important pages. And I mean your most important pages, not the whole site. Your home page. Your main experience pages. Your booking page. Those are the ones doing the persuading, and those are the ones where the quality of the language genuinely matters. German and French alone will open up a serious share of the European market that is currently bouncing off you. It is done once. It keeps working.

And then there is the part that most people never think about at all, which is search.

A page that exists only in English simply does not appear when somebody searches in German. It is not ranking badly. It is not in the race.

A page properly translated into German, with the language tagged correctly so search engines know what they are looking at, can appear for German-language searches about walks in Connemara or things to do in Clare with children. You are not just translating words at that point. You are opening a door into a market that could not find you before, no matter how well you rank in English.

One last practical note. If you do translate, get a human to do it, ideally somebody who has been to Ireland. Machine translation handles facts reasonably well and handles charm very badly. And the charm is the thing you are selling.

And there is something else, smaller but worth knowing, which is that the signal often matters before the substance does.

If somebody lands on your site and sees a language option in the corner, they relax slightly, even before they click it. It says somebody here thought about people like me. That is a welcome, and welcomes are your whole business.

The same goes for a simple line saying that some of your team speak German, or that you are well used to French visitors and nobody needs perfect English to have a great morning. That is one sentence. It costs nothing. And it answers a worry that plenty of people carry around and would never mention.

And when you do translate, think about what you translate first. It is tempting to start with the beautiful writing, the story of the place, the bit you are proudest of. Start with the practical instead. What it costs. How long it takes. What to wear. Whether children can come. Whether it runs in the rain, which in this country is not a small question.

Because the poetry can survive being read in imperfect English. The practical detail cannot. Somebody will squint through a lyrical paragraph about the light on the water and enjoy it well enough. They will not risk two hundred euro on a price they are not certain they understood.

So what can you do this week? Three jobs.

The first one. Open your analytics and look at which countries your visitors come from. If Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy or Spain appear anywhere in your top five, then you already have the demand. Those people are finding you and leaving. That is a far better problem to have than nobody finding you at all, and it is a much easier one to fix.

The second. If you have no translation on your site at all, put a translation button on it. It is free and it is an afternoon's work at most. It will not be elegant. It will remove the hard wall, which is the thing actually costing you.

And the third. Pick your two or three most important pages and get a price for proper translation into German and French. I think the number will surprise you on the low side. It is done once, it never needs doing again unless you change the page, and it works quietly for years.

And here is what I want to leave you with.

Your first hello should feel familiar to whoever it reaches, wherever they are reading it.

You have spent years building a welcome that people remember.

It would be a shame to have it stop at the language.