*Foreword: this turned into a rather longer post than I had expected. The importance of language and localization online is one of my pet topics (I’ve just decided that it would be what I’d [talk about at BlogCamp](http://barcamp.ch/BlogCampSwitzerland#unAgenda), rather than teenagers and stuff), so I do tend to get carried away a little.*
I was surprised last night to realise that this wasn’t necessarily obvious — so I think it’s probably worth a blog post.
**The fact a service is in English only is a showstopper for many non-native speakers, hence a barrier to wider adoption in Europe.**
But doesn’t everybody speak English, more or less? Isn’t it the *lingua franca* of today that **everybody** speaks? It isn’t. At least not in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and I’m certain there are many other places in Europe where the situation is similar.
Come and spend a little time in Lausanne, for example, and try communicating in English with the man on the street. Even if many people have done a couple of years of English at school, most have never had any use for it after that and have promptly forgotten it. German is a way more important “foreign language” around here, as it is the linguistic majority in Switzerland, and most administrative centers of big companies (and the government) are in the German-speaking part of the country (which doesn’t mean that everybody speaks German, either).
The people who are reasonably comfortable with English around here will most often be those who have taken up higher academic studies, particularly in scientific subjects (“soft” and “hard” science alike).
And if I’m the person who comes to your mind when you think “Swiss”, think again — my father is British, I was born in England, went to an English medium school and spoke English at home until I was 8, conversed regularly with English-speaking grandparents during my growing years, and never stopped reading in English: all that gave me enough of a headstart that even though my English had become very rusty at the end of my teens, I dove into the English-speaking internet with a passion, and spent an anglophone [year in India](/logbook/). So, no. I’m not your average Lausanne-living French-speaker. I’m a strange bilingual beast.
Imagine somebody whose native language is not English, even though they may theoretically know enough English to get around if you parachuted them into London. (Let’s forget about the man on the street who barely understands you when you ask where the station is.) I like to think of [my (step-)sister](http://isablog.wordpress.com/) as a good test-case (not that I want to insist on the “step-“, but it explains why she isn’t bilingual). She took up the “modern languages” path at school, which means she did German, English, and Italian during her teenage years, and ended up being quite proficient in all three (she’s pretty good with languages). She went to university after that and used some English during her studies. But since then, she honestly hasn’t had much use for the language. She’ll read my blog in English, can converse reasonably comfortably, but will tend to watch the TV series I lend her in the dubbed French version.
I’m telling you this to help paint a picture of somebody which you might (legitimately) classify as “speaks English”, but for whom it represents an extra effort. And again, I’d like to insist, my sister would be very representative of most people around here who “speak English but don’t use it regularly at work”. That is already not representative of the general population, who “did a bit of English at school but forgot it all” and can barely communicate with the lost English-speaking tourist. Oh, and forget about the teenagers: they start English at school when they’re 13, and by the time they’re 15-16 they *might* (if they are lucky) have enough knowledge of it to converse on everyday topics (again: learning German starts a few years before that, and is more important in the business world). This is the state of “speaking English” around here.
A service or tool which is not available in French faces a barrier to adoption in the *Suisse Romande* on two levels:
– first of all, there are people who simply don’t know enough English to understand what’s written on the sign-up page;
– second, there are people who would understand most of what’s on the sign-up page, but for whom it represents and extra effort.
Let’s concentrate on the second batch. An *extra effort”?! Lazy people! Think of it. All this talk about making applications more usable, about optimizing the sign-up process to make it so painless that people can do it with their eyes closed? Well, throw a page in a foreign language at most normal people and they’ll perceive it as an extra difficulty. And it may very well be the one that just makes them navigate away from the page and never come back. Same goes for using the service or application once they have signed up: it makes everything more complicated, and people anticipate that.
Let’s look at some examples.
The first example isn’t exactly about a web service or application, but it shows how important language is for the adoption of new ideas (this isn’t anything groundbreaking if you look at human history, but sometimes the web seems to forget that the world hasn’t changed that much…). Thanks for bearing with me while I ramble on.
In February 2001, I briefly mentioned [the WaSP Browser Push](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2001/02/16/to-hell-with-bad-browsers/) and realised that the French-speaking web was really [“behind” on design and web standards ressources](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2001/02/13/poor-french-web/). I also realised that although [there was interest for web standards](http://mammouthland.free.fr/weblog/2001/fevrier_01.php3), many French-speaking people couldn’t read the original English material. This encouraged me to [blog in French about it](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2001/02/24/tableaux-ou-non/), [translate Zeldman’s article](http://pompage.net/pompe/paitre/), [launching](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2001/03/21/faire-part/) the translation site [pompage.net](http://pompage.net/) in the process. Pompage.net, and the [associated mailing-list](http://fr.groups.yahoo.com/group/pompeurs/), followed a year or so later by [OpenWeb](http://openweb.eu.org/), eventually became a hub for the budding francophone web standards community, which is still very active to this day.
([What happened with the Swiss Blog Awards](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/04/30/about-the-swiss-blog-awards-sbaw/) is in my opinion another example of how important language issues are.)
Back to web applications proper. [Flickr](http://flickr.com) is an application I love, but I have a hard time getting people to sign up and use it, even when I’ve walked them through the lengthy Yahoo-ID process. [WordPress.com](http://fr.wordpress.com), on the other hand, exists in French, and I can now easily persuade my friends and clients to open blogs there. There is a strong [French-speaking WordPress community](http://wordpress-fr.net/) too. A few years ago, when the translation and support were not what they are now, a very nice little blogging tool named [DotClear](http://www.dotclear.net/) became hugely popular amongst francophone bloggers (and it still is!) in part because it was in French when other major blogging solutions were insufficient in that respect.
Regarding WordPress, I’d like to point out the [community-driven translation effort](http://translate.wordpress.com/) to which everybody can contribute. Such an open way of doing things has its pitfalls (like dreadful, dreadful translations which linger on the home page until somebody comes along to correct them) but overall, I think the benefits outweigh the risks. In almost no time, dozens of localized versions can be made available, maintained by those who know the language best.
Let’s look at teenagers. When [MySpace](http://myspace.com) was all that was being talked about in the US, French-speaking teenagers were going wild on [skyblog](http://skyblog.com). MySpace is catching up a bit now because it [also exists in French](http://fr.myspace.com/). [Facebook](http://www.facebook.com/)? In English, nobody here has heard of it. [Live Messenger aka MSN](http://www.windowslive.fr/messenger/default.asp)? Very much in French, [unlike ICQ](http://icq.com/), which is only used here by anglophile early adopters.
[Skype](http://skype.com/intl/fr/) and [GMail](http://gmail.com)/[GTalk](http://www.google.com/talk/intl/fr/) are really taking off here now that they are available in French.
Learning to use a new service, or just trying out the latest toy, can be challenging enough an experience for the average user without adding the extra hurdle of having to struggle with an unfamiliar language. Even though a non-localized service like Flickr may be the home to [various linguistic groups](http://www.flickr.com/groups/topic/69039/), it’s important to keep in mind that their members will tend to be the more “anglophone” of this language group, and are not representative.
**The bottom line is that even with a lot of encouragement, most local people around here are not going to use a service which doesn’t talk to them in their language.**
***9:52 Afterthought credit:***
I just realised that this article on [why startups condense in America](http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html) was the little seed planted a few days ago which finally brought me to writing this post. I haven’t read all the article, but this little part of it struck me and has been working in the background ever since:
> What sustains a startup in the beginning is the prospect of getting their initial product out. The successful ones therefore make the first version as simple as possible. In the US they usually begin by making something just for the local market.
> This works in America, because the local market is 300 million people. It wouldn’t work so well in Sweden. In a small country, a startup has a harder task: they have to sell internationally from the start.
> The EU was designed partly to simulate a single, large domestic market. The problem is that the inhabitants still speak many different languages. So a software startup in Sweden is still at a disadvantage relative to one in the US, because they have to deal with internationalization from the beginning. It’s significant that the most famous recent startup in Europe, Skype, worked on a problem that was intrinsically international.
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I totally agree with you. For different reasons I’m more or less in the same kind of abnormal multilingual statusn with one more thing : I live in a country (Germany) whose language I don’t master…. I arrived there not speaking at all, and went on working in English.
Well most of the friends I met at the beginning, in my job, speak a propoer business-english, but are not that much at ease with daily-life english. And the other ones, that I met through normal socializing are in a variety of positions between barely being able to say “hello” and being able to have a conversation with me, but without nuances.
Nevertheless, Germans, not having the necessity French Swiss have, of learning German first, are a little bit better in learning english at school, and start earlier, but forget as quick as possible if they don’t have to use it.
The second area where I live is Morocco. This is a totally different context, because here people also have to grow up at least bilingual, sometimes trilingual, but with languages which are belonging to two different families. There is no structure similarity between French and Arabic. Then they have to learn english very young at school, and then they might also start spanish. Morocoo is living on tourism, and puts a big effort in language education. The reseult is that they have basical knowledges in many languages (even learning them just by hearing their foreign customers), but a very bad reading ability for the low or middle-educated people.
The pyramid f criteria for adoption of services starts with simplicity. For example blogger is much more used than WordPress or Dotclear just because it is so simple.
The second criteria is language.
The other thing related to “translation” is the cultural aspect. A community like Flickr for example, is in its behaviour, typically american, and not German. (quick and praise, versus deyailed, formalized criticism). Such services are building communities with a culture, and the language is also a part of the culture. So if a service wants to develop a commmunity in a country, it has to fit the culture.
PS: nice to be able to comment again
There is worse than a service only available in English: paypal. As soon as you select Switzerland as your country of residence, the whole site switches to German, with no way of changing it back, other than lying on said country or creating an account using the forms in German, changing your language settings to English, the only other available language, and hoping your preference sticks, which it does not.
What’s worse is that paypal.fr is in French and paypal.it in Italian, so the translations exist. And even if they didn’t, there is no excuse to forcing the language based on a mailing address.
Of course, I have notified paypal of the problem. I have tried three kinds of e-mails: polite and detailed, short and angry, and pigeon German, all to no avail.
I totally agree, as Marie-Aude. I am Swiss too but I went to school in France. Statistics in France say that only 1% of people who have reached the baccalauréat ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baccalaur%C3%A9at ) can understand an english converstion, and that, knowing every student in France studies english at school.
About my case, I am also an exception, coming from a family in which nearly everyone speaks at least 3 foreign languages. I feel ridiculous with my average skills in english and basics in esperanto. :p
Regarding the comment that culturally French-speaking Switzerland seems to be more connected to France than to the rest of Switzerland…
I know that the language isn’t that different than what’s spoken in France. But the French seem to think so!
Case in point, here in Quebec I once said, “je me suis mariee en mil neuf cents nonante” and I got classified as “not French speaking.”
If the numbers and some idiomatic expressions are the ONLY differences, why does the rest of the Francophone world (except for Belgium) act that way about a few little differences?! As if the fact that Switzerland (and Belgium) knows how to count, alone, makes it “not French” or “not real French” – when everyone knows that in the original Latin where French comes from there were actual words for seventy, eighty, and ninety along with the rest of the numbers.
I could be like Belgium’s expatriate population and just live in English-only here in Canada.
Another point I should make is that in Switzerland and Belgium I did not experience the level of hostility towards English or the English or even Americans that I have here in Quebec, in Canada, “bilingual” Canada. Of course, neither Belgium nor Switzerland were ever England’s archenemies in the prior centuries’ quests for world domination and empire formation.
@Eloise
I’m French, but I’ve lived and worked in Belgium, Canada and Switzerland, among other countries.
And i’d say the difference is more than the numbers and “some” idiomatic expressions. Or these expressions are maybe more important than a few expressions.
And these differences are different in Quebec, and Belgium. Belgium French is quite influenced by german, through flemish. “Je ne sais pas le faire” (I don’t know how to do it) does not mean you don’t have the knowledge, but taht you don’t have the opportunity / possibility / authorization.
French Canadian is quite far away from “French French”, and I remember how hard it was for me the first time I had to work there, daily words like “encoder” for example don’t exist in French. And of course, not mentionning joual 🙂
So for me, it’s a different French, and differently different in each of these countries… some things arejust expressions, some things are contamination from english or german, but it does not mean it’s a better or worse language. It’s just different.
I think it’s good that one fights to keep his own language, instead of slowly going to a kind of “mashed international slang”. Specially because the bast way to do it is to learn other languages, and know them well enough not to mix things.
And since living in Germany, I have a good idea of what it means to be faced to a language you don’t really understand…