De Culturis
Mundi

Last night as I was cleaning up some old stuff I have found this article written around 2002. It was meant for an ezine but somehow I never published it. Obviously the numbers were referring to the situation four years ago - but the main idea is still valid. More so, since blogs and blogging followed the fate of so many things before: from a simple hobby nowadays they are becoming more and more “business-like” things…
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Dumb question… — you might say, my site already is on the world wide web.
I admit that may be true, but let’s take a closer look at these well-known 3 W’s.

World Wide Web

Statistics lately show the fastest growing Internet usage occurs in places like urban Brazil, urban Colombia, Spain, urban Egypt, urban China, urban South Africa, urban Argentina and Poland.

It’s also worth to mention the highest proportion of Internet users (in percentage of the total population) can be found in Sweden: 65 per cent. Next in the line are Canada, USA, South Korea, Singapore, Germany. And despite the huge volume of Internet users - approx. 108 million - the U.S. now represents only 39 percent of Internet usage worldwide.

For North America based businesses of course the number of “local” Internet users seem to be suficient as a marketing target. But don’t forget a research source last year stated: There are 4,400 new web sites every day… By 2002, the number of web pages will exceed the number of people.

Even if not all of them are going to try to sell something to its visitors, a true “www-marketer” has to take into account the changing demographics of the web.

Translate or not to translate?

Many corporate websites being aware of the wast number of potential non-Anglo visitors, translate their websites into languages of world wide circulation. For a small home-based business this isn’t the way to go. The effort and/or the costs would not be repaid for them even in a longer term.

In this case shouldn’t we just disregard the rest of the world?
Well, yes, you can do that. But probably it would be smarter to have them in your mind when developing your web site. Without quoting more statistics we can refer to the fact that a rapidly increasing number of non-English speaker Internet users do understand English at various levels. Just signing up for a free email account or while visiting the simplest web site the surfer has to be able to understand basic English. And sooner or later they will arrive to your site, too!

So, here we are: people from around the (wide) world coming to your site, they even understand English and might be interested in the product you are selling. Then they start reading your “selling page”.
I am sure all of you have studied zillion of courses, guides, templates about how to write killer, bullet-proof selling copies. I did the same on my turn. All of them (or almost all of them) proved to be very useful, providing good practical advices.
However after a while I have realized they are lacking something important if the web is going to be really international. (Actually, it is!)

I hate to sound too scientific, so I will try to put it in really plain English. What I was missing was the appeal of these selling copies to visitors grown up in other cultures. The matter is even if they are able to read and speak English, having a totally different cultural background they easily can (and do!) misunderstand or misinterpret the message of the site. It also could happen that being socialized and conditioned in a different culture their reaction to a well-formulated text will be completely the opposite to what we expect.

Cultural differences do count when trying to communicate with your visitors from around the world!

Some multinational giants and international organizations have realized that a while ago and they moved toward what is called “cross-cultural communication”.

I will talk about the secrets of cross-cultural communication in the second part of this article.
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(Of course, that second part never got written…)