4 million reasons

What should I consider before translating my site into Catalan?

Beginning this week we are going to present a series of articles to answer the question: “why should I translate my website into...?”, exploring the advantages of having a multilingual website.

In this first instalment, we wanted to answer a question we get asked a lot, especially by people doing business in Spain: is it worth translating your website into Catalan? If so, which businesses or sectors is it most appropriate for?

Where is Catalan spoken?

Like French, Spanish and Italian, Catalan is a language descended from Latin and is spoken in several European countries, mainly in Spain, in the Catalonia, Valencia, Balearic Islands and Aragon regions. It is also spoken in the Principality of Andorra, where it is the official language, in some parts of southern France, and in the Sardinian city of Alghero in Italy. According to the InformeCAT 2019 report, the major annual statistical report for the language, Catalan has a total of more than 10 million speakers, approximately half of whom speak it as a native language (more than 4 million people). This means that within the ranking of the most-spoken languages, Catalan ranks more or less alongside Swedish or Bulgarian.

Map showing regions where Catalan is spoken - Image © Generalitat de Catalunya

In order to understand the significance of Catalan more clearly, it is worth noting that there are more than 100 newspapers and magazines published in Catalan in Spain alone.

Catalonia also enjoys a full seven TV channels, the most watched being TV3, whose programming is entirely in Catalan. The same goes for radio, where the most listened in the region are RAC1 and Catalunya Radio.

Many of the top social networks (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Skype, Badoo) are also available in this language.

Catalan speakers are also quite active internet users. Surprisingly enough, Catalan is among the 20 languages with the highest number of Wikipedia articles, meaning speakers are actively involved in its development, as again shown in the InformeCAT report.

The LanguageTool project shows us another interesting fact, which is the sheer vitality of Catalan’s online community. This grammar checker is based on rules written by the user community. Catalan has more than 3000 rules, more than English, German and Spanish, and second only to Dutch, as can be seen on the project page.

Additionally, as shown by the data from the annual AIMC (Association for Media Research) study (available in Spanish only), referring to the period 2018/2019, Catalonia is the third region of Spain, behind Madrid and the Basque Country, with the highest rate of Internet usage, with 80.3%, surpassing the Spanish average of 77.9%.

The advantages of having a website in Catalan

Although the opportunity to have content in Catalan is not a widely debated topic on the Internet, it is interesting to analyse the issue from a purely commercial point of view.

There are various advantages that come with making a website available in Catalan, especially for companies with headquarters or activities based in Catalonia.

As detailed in the blog of Fintech business investor François Derbaix, who conducted a study on the subject, only 1 out of 4 Catalan users surf the Internet in their own language. The rest use the internet in Spanish. So the benefit provided by the Catalan part of users is quite small. However, it should also be noted that this is often due to the fact that although a Catalan language page may be available, the Spanish version often has more extensive information and more options to choose from.

In this respect we can affirm that the Internet is killing minority languages. If a user understands several languages, they are likely to choose the language that provides the most information.

For example, if I’m looking for a flat by the beach and I understand both Catalan and Spanish, but I see that more options are available in Spanish, I’m going to opt for this language, even if my mother tongue is Catalan.

As we saw in a previous article, translating a website from beginning to end is a significant investment. In most cases it is not just a question of translating the items on the menu or the buttons on the portal, but also of completing all the service and product descriptions in an additional language, managing translations between Catalan and Spanish, and even moderating a forum or maintaining a blog in Catalan.

So, following this analysis, we could conclude that translating our website into Catalan just isn’t worth it, right? Well, there are a few more figures that might just tip the balance in favour of Catalan.

The difference between collaborators and end users

Although having a website in Catalan is not very profitable if you are focussed on your final (user) audience, when we talk about websites aimed at partners or collaborators, the balance tips in the other direction.

This aspect is especially important in the tourism and hospitality sector. Many tourism portals work with partners who provide facilities and services. In this sense, Catalonia is an important tourist destination within Spain, and Catalan is the main language, especially in the interior and northern regions.

As according to the Toprural blog, the majority of rural homeowners who came into contact with this portal only spoke Catalan.

In order to speed up communication and increase the platform’s use, Toprural invested in translating its website into Catalan. It is therefore important that portals like this provide services in the language most spoken by their main users, even if these are not the site’s end users.

Booking.com noticed a similar pattern. Like Toprural, Booking.com has also translated its pages into Catalan to make it easier for partners to access and navigate.

The result? Both portals doubled their market share in Catalonia. In the case of Toprural, this exceeded their market share in the rest of Spain put together. The Catalan translation helped these companies to climb to top positions within the region to become leaders in the sector.

We might say that for a B2C (business to consumer) website, a Catalan translation will not lead to a significant increase in visits. However, companies that target a business audience that interacts directly with the site, as in the case of tourist accommodation portals, will benefit greatly when they can offer their customers an interface in the Catalan language.

Obviously, each company should analyse its market and potential traffic and decide whether investing in translation pays off for them before making a decision like this, especially when we consider that the cost of a quality translation is often quite substantial, as we have seen in other articles.