Supposing, your company doesn’t want to sell only in the USA, Australia and other countries where English is the official language, English content is not enough.

If you plan to start your business in Russia, one of the first thing to do is to translate your site in Russian. You can create just another version of your site in Russian or develop a landing page, for example.

Why is it so important? In this article we will explain it!

Russians speak Russian

Former German Chancellor Willy Brandt said: « If I am selling to you, then I speak your language, but if you want to sell something to me, then you must speak German”. 

In Russia just a small percentage of people understand and speak English quite well. Most of them studied English at school and maybe at the University, but then forgot it because of lack of practice and due to the fact that they don’t use it.

So if you want to sell your products or services, you have to adapt site into the Russian language.

Do you want to promote your site? Promote it in Russian!

Of course, if you want to promote your business online, you should translate your website in Russian.

If poorly written, your site will be viewed on less, which means the effectiveness of your advertising campaign will be lower and its cost higher. Can you imagine on-page SEO applied to a text with grammatical and syntactical errors? In such case, it is unlikely your page would appear in the top results of an organic search.

Let’s assume that a user has read an article of yours on your site. If it’s poorly written and difficult to read, most likely he/she won’t share it.

If the purpose of content marketing is to retain the user for as long as possible on your site by showing that you are an expert in the field, a bad translation will produce exactly the opposite effect.

 Only a few people will be willing to mention, recommend and link their site to your content if it is hard to read and understand.

So international online promotion strategy is very important, but must be accompanied by a language strategy.

People trust site if it has version in their own language

One of the major objectives of e-commerce is to allow the user to perceive the website as safe and reliable. For this task, product descriptions play a fundamental role. Most of Russian citizens chose products whose descriptions were correctly written in Russian, preferring them to identical products whose descriptions contained errors.

Professionally translating content for an online store not only emphasises the reliability of the website, but gives the store a real advantage over competitors who have not shown enough concern for the linguistic aspect.

Also, if you’re thinking of selling online in Russia with a website in English, keep in mind that this will reduce the number of your potential customers. According to the recent surveys, 81.7% of Russians would never buy medicine without being able to read a description in their own language, 37.4% wouldn’t buy technological products, 33.9% wouldn’t buy tourism services, 33% wouldn’t buy food, 20.9% wouldn’t book a hotel and 20% wouldn’t buy clothes.

Just as in the « real » world, what you say and how you say it in online sales play a fundamental role on a potential customer’s decision to purchase your product or service.

Conclusion

Unprofessionally or machine-translated content published on a website negatively or very negatively affects the potential customer’s perception of the company, its products and/or service

Don’t just talk about quality, reliability, attention to detail and excellent customer service. You have to prove it! And professional website translation is a great way to do it. Remember, I’m not the one saying this; your potential customers are!