Foreign language facts that will benefit your business

A good business is always looking for ways they can expand and grow. One of the ways company leaders can achieve this is by making partnerships abroad. However, international business often requires employees to learn and understand the cultures and foreign languages of your partners – which can be extremely difficult. After all, English is often regarded as the lingua franca for business. Although there are plenty of countries where you must utilise the native language of a specific country or culture. 

As linguistic specialists, we know it’s not possible to learn all of the foreign languages needed before expansion. Therefore, the team at Absolute Translations stress the importance of using translation services from an expert translation company to help you communicate with your business partners.

However, before you get started, it’s important to understand the exact languages you require for translation. After all, you may want to do business in India but there are over 22 official Indian languages spoken in the country. So which one do you choose? Here at Absolute Translations – one of the UK’s top professional translation providers, we have selected three foreign language facts to help you successfully navigate international markets. 

The US doesn’t have an official language.

The United States is a hub for a wide variety of different cultures and languages. As a result, there are currently over 300 languages spoken in the US. However, despite the range of languages spoken, there is no official language. While English is the most commonly spoken, data has shown that 21 percent of Americans speak another language. Out of this statistic, a total of 60 percent were Spanish speaking – meaning that documents and business materials should be provided in Spanish and other commonly spoken languages. 

French is one of the fastest growing languages.

It may come as a surprise to people that French could be the language of the future – as opposed to popular contenders, Mandarin or Spanish. However, it is important to remember that French was once the world’s lingua franca and it still is in many Western and Central African countries. With this in mind, linguistic experts have predicted that by 2050 the language will be spoken by 750 million people – making it the most spoken language in the world. It’s important to consider this fact as your business expands as marketing materials translated into French could benefit your business in the long-run.

Twitter’s top three languages are English, Japanese and Spanish.

Shortly after Facebook and Instagram, Twitter is the most popular social media platform in terms of monthly users. In 2019, it was reported that Twitter has a total of 321 million monthly users. There are also 500 million tweets sent each day – which is 5,787 posts every second. Out of the millions of tweets posted every day, only 34 percent of them are written in English. A further 16 percent is written in Japanese and 12 percent in Spanish – making them the second and third most popular languages on Twitter. For businesses, this shows that Twitter should be utilised for their overseas businesses in the native language of its location.  

To find out more information about our translations services, why not get in touch with our team today on 0333 577 0767.