According to Waheed Barghouthi, CEO of online translation company Dakwak, marketers in the United Arab Emirates are missing out on a potential $30 trillion dollar internet sales opportunity due to their reluctance to translate and localize company websites for different countries.

The fact is that consumers are more likely to buy a product when information is provided in their native language; statistics support this fact, with 54% of customers stating that availability of information in their own language is more important than the price of the product/service.

Given the huge potential, why is it that so many companies in UAE appear to be ignoring this opportunity and are not investing enough in foreign languages?

The answer is that many businesses perceive website translation and localization as being very expensive and time-consuming. However, if these companies wish to expand and grow, then they will have to realize the enormous potential to maximize sales by localizing their websites for different countries.

So, how can businesses take advantage of this huge sales opportunity?

First of all, they should research the most relevant languages for their market. They can then use machine translation tools to translate their website into those languages and track the traffic on the translated pages for a short period of time. Depending on the amount of traffic for each language, they can then make an informed decision on which languages most enhance their sales potential and should be professionally translated.

Article Marketers in the Emirates ‘lost in translation’  was summarised by by Rachel Robertson.