One of the things I recommend to clients is that they decouple adding new languages from regional expansion. Adding language support is often a pre-requisite for success in international markets, but it is by no means the only factor in success. Because it is something you’ll need to do anyway, it is best to get this out of the way before contemplating regional expansion.
Depending on the nature of your business, regional expansion may be relatively easy, or it may be hellishly difficult. The former tends to be true for consumer and SaaS applications that are all digital. The latter tends to be the case for businesses that have an on the ground presence or that are heavily regulated.
Example of the things that you may need to account for in international expansion:
- Adding language support in your app and supporting assets (localization)
- Adding support for additional currencies and payment methods
- Displaying and collecting VAT (value added tax)
- Complying with local data privacy, security and hosting requirements (e.g. GDPR)
- Complying with industry specific regulations in new regions
- Opening regional sales, marketing and support operations, if needed
Because of this, the decision to expand into new regions requires high level executive support and coordination. It is easy for companies to get stuck in analysis paralysis in weighing when to launch this effort, whereas adding languages is relatively easy and inexpensive.
Breaking Out Language Support From Regional Expansion
The Spanish speaking market in the US is enormous and in some regions such as Los Angeles, well over 30% of the population speaks Spanish at home (about 15% nationwide). There are more than 60 million Spanish speakers in the US. Only Mexico has a larger Spanish speaking population. US Spanish speakers also command almost $2 trillion dollars in purchasing power.
At Lyft, we localized the apps primarily to better serve US drivers and riders who speak English as a second language. Readiness for international expansion was a consideration but it wasn’t the primary driver behind the effort.
You can think of localizing your product and supporting assets to Spanish as a dry run for future international expansion. Even if you don’t expand into new regions, you’ll be positioning your company to do well in the domestic Latin market. In the process of building out the tooling to support another language, you will be doing much of the work needed to support international expansion.
What variant of Spanish should we use? Just as there are differences between British and US English, the same is true for Spanish. When supporting Spanish in the US, it generally makes sense to use a Latin America or Mexican variant since these variants are widely understood by US Spanish speakers. One callout worth mentioning is that if you are targeting a specific region or metro, you might use a variant that is more relevant to the local population. In southern Florida there are large populations from Cuba and Puerto Rico. The issue isn’t that people can’t understand each other, it is more about brand acceptance and preference.
What user touch points should be localized? This depends if you are treating this is as an experiment or are committed to a broader rollout, especially if it is backed by marketing outreach. In the first case, you can test app localization pretty inexpensively, but be aware that absent marketing support, localization doesn’t automatically mean customers will show up. We generally recommend that companies treat all touch points including UI, websites, help center and life cycle comms equally. Otherwise customers may perceive they are being treated as second class citizens. This is also worth doing because you’ll commit to building the technical infrastructure to localize these touch points, which you will need when you do expand to international markets.
How much will it cost to offer a Spanish localized experience? The answer depends on the surface area of your application and supporting assets. Direct translation costs tend to be overshadowed by engineering and IT costs in the initial push to add the first new language. The important point is that if you anticipate expanding to other regions, this is a way to get a lot of the foundational work out of the way while showing short term results (e.g. net extra paid seats attributable to Spanish speaking users in the US). See Budgeting For Localization for a detailed discussion about this.
I am in Europe. How does this heuristic apply to my company? This same logic applies to nearly every other country. France has a large Arabic speaking population. Germany has a large Turkish speaking population. Many countries use English as a lingua franca. So this same pattern can be applied elsewhere as a prelude to international expansion, and to de-risk future expansion efforts.
Related Reading
Which Languages Should We Target? – if you are planning to follow the Spanish rollout with support for international languages, this article provides advice on how to target and rank languages using several complimentary criteria.
Budgeting For Localization – this article explains how to build out a budget for a localization program. If you need to quickly spitball costs, estimate the number of words of content you need to translate and multiply that by $0.25/word for a rough estimate of what to expect. Double or triple that number since you are probably undercounting.
Selecting A Translation Management System – you will need to choose a TMS provider prior to kicking off translation work. This article discusses what criteria to use in choosing this vendor.
Hiring Multilingual Staff – one way to position your company for success is to hire staff who speak the languages you anticipate supporting. There is no shortage of bilingual English-Spanish speakers in the US. You can also look into near-shoring EPD staff in Latin American countries, Mexico in particular.