English-language online shops target French, German and Dutch markets

French is the most popular language into which English-language ecommerce website are translated. This is followed by German and, quite surprising, Dutch. The language that’s spoken in the Netherlands and the Flemish part of Belgium is more popular than Italian or Spanish.

This is shown by research from One Hour Translation, which analyzed 4,000 translation projects by ecommerce websites. The analysis ranked target languages according to the rate of translation projects opened for them, against the total number of translation projects for English-language online stores.

This year, most translations happened from English to French, with 13.5 percent of the total projects. It was followed closely by German, with 13.4 percent only slightly behind French translations. But what surprised researchers the most, was the fact Dutch was ranked third, with 11.3 percent of the projects. It left Italian (10%), Korean (9.8%), Japanese and Spanish (both 9.3%) behind. Last year, the top three was formed by French, German and Spanish.

“The fact that the French and German markets top the priorities of global ecommerce players immediately below the English-speaking markets is not surprising, since Germany and France are the strongest economies in Continental Europe”, says co-founder Yaron Kaufman. “French and German are also spoken in other strong economies such as Canada, Switzerland and Austria. Dutch came third as a target language in 2016, and this strengthening demonstrates the resilience of the economy and purchasing power of the Netherlands compared to other European countries.”