Inside Out

picture by MFinChina

Most people on the Internet speak English. Every English site sooner or later gets it’s German clone. So theres a fight between the English speaking Original being translated into German wanting its piece of the German pie and the “original German” clone. Sometimes the German clone even adds English and tries to enter the territory of the original.Ok obviously that’s not new. TechCrunch for example had an article on that topic about 1 Million years ago.

As German is the 5th mostly used language this totally makes sense to me because the market is there. No.2 to 4 are Chinese, Spanish and Japanese. I’m very sure about China and Japan clones as the situation is very similar to the German speaking area.  China and Japan are not only united by their language but they are also one country. Austria, parts of Swiss and Germany have more or less one language but they tend to prefer products adopted to the country. I assume thats similar for Spanish.

That’s the theory so far as we also see it in the facebook vs StudiVZ fight. So get some sort of idea how my cliché fits reality I made a short list comparing some sites to some clones also regarding if they are available in German and/ or English.

As we see in the chart about half of the sites don’t offer a multilingual choice. I’m aware that this is not really representative and sites like Twitter don’t really need to be translated (even though in this case it wouldn’t be that much work). Still regarding the internationalization, globalisation isn’t that surprising? I have the feeling that most sites which now offer multi languages did that a while after they launched their original product.

Is it still common to build your product just for your local market? Isn’t it some sort of startup mentality to think big and according to that we need to implement multi languages right at the beginning? My feeling is that this is changing right now and to me that’s a good choice. All or nothing right? Or did it start to change long ago and I just missed it?

Also interesting in this context is the GDP by Language 1975-2010 chart and MFinChina’s flickr page.