Which languages to choose when you start exporting?
The question is never "which languages" in the abstract, but "which documents, in which language, for which market, and in what order". Here is a method that takes four steps and avoids translating what no one will read.
Published on 16/09/2026 · 6 min read · Manuce, document translation by specialists
English first, but not English alone
English opens the door: it is the working language of buyers, trade shows and international tenders. It is rarely enough to close it, that is to say to seal the deal.
A frequently cited study by CSA Research (2020) shows that a large majority of online buyers prefer to purchase in their own language, and that a significant proportion of them abandon a site that is not in their language. The reality on the ground is simpler: a buyer reads English, but signs in their own language, and their technical department has no desire to translate your manual.
The four stages of prioritisation
1. Start from your sales, not from a map
Pull out the turnover by country for the last twelve months, and the list of incoming enquiries that came to nothing. The two together give you your real markets and your frustrated markets. That is your order of priority, not the global GDP ranking.
2. Separate documents by function
Not all your documents have the same return per euro translated:
- What drives sales : brochure, product sheet, website page, sales presentation;
- What closes deals : quote, terms and conditions, contract;
- What is mandatory : manual, labelling, declaration of conformity, safety;
- What brings them back : user guide, after-sales service, warranty.
The translation order is not that: start with the mandatory — without it you cannot sell legally — then what drives sales.
3. Group by market proximity
France's main trading partners are its neighbours: Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, plus the United Kingdom and the United States. An initial German–Italian–Spanish–Dutch batch covers most of the European market accessible by lorry, and these are base-rate languages.
4. Translate in a single batch
Two reasons, one economic, the other qualitative. Economic: the discount increases with the number of languages — 20% for two languages, 50% from five onwards. Qualitative: all versions are produced together, from the same source, by the same specialist — rather than four translators each deciding separately.
Regional pitfalls
- European or Brazilian Portuguese : two markets, two spellings, two commercial vocabularies.
- European or Latin American Spanish : same remark, and the informal second person is not distributed in the same way.
- Simplified or traditional Chinese : mainland and Singapore on one side, Taiwan and Hong Kong on the other. This is not a stylistic variant.
- British or American English : beyond spelling, units, date formats and legal vocabulary differ.
- Belgium, Switzerland, Canada : multilingual by law or custom. Check the requirement before choosing a single language.
What it costs in practice
Take commercial and technical documentation of 15,000 words, to be translated into German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch. Four languages, all at the base rate, 40% discount.
At the Professional level, you're looking at around €610 for the whole lot, delivered in a few minutes whilst preserving the original layout. At a translation agency, the same order runs into thousands of euros and weeks. The decision is no longer "translate or not", it's "which level for which document": Premium for notices and contracts, Professional for the rest.
What we're asked on this subject
Should you translate your website before your documents?
Rarely. A translated website attracts enquiries you won't be able to handle if your quote, your terms and conditions and your instructions don't follow. First translate what you need to close and deliver a sale, then what you need to attract one.
How many languages to start with?
Two or three, chosen on your actual sales. One language too many that you don't maintain is worth less than one language too few that's well kept: each version will need updating with every product change.
How do you manage updates?
By starting again from the amended source document and regenerating all the languages at once. That's what keeps versions synchronised—the classic mistake being to correct the French and forget the other five.
What about languages with non-Latin scripts?
The supplement depends on the language: +25% for Russian, Ukrainian or Greek, +60% for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic or Hindi. They require particular attention to layout: reading direction, fonts, hyphenation. Chinese, Japanese and Korean preserve the original layout; Arabic, Hebrew, Thai and Indian scripts are delivered in Word and reformatted PDF.
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