Czechidea.com

Importance of being international

In discussion on John Vanhara’s blog (sorry, only in Czech) we touched – apart from other things – the importance of building your projects and apps international. Czech market, and almost every other non-English European market (probably with Spanish, French and German exception) is too small to bring you back your fruits on your project, if it is focused solely on your native-speaking users.

Of course, there are plenty of projects where internationalization would not make any sense, most probably those which relies on published written content, but there is no reason not to translate and internationalize web app, tool or service.

Flashing example of web app, which could be easily deployed also in other languages (read ‘English’ in this case) is Pichacky.com. Czech tool for tracking your time spend on internet. Stats are counted according your ICQ, jabber or Skype status (offline, online, away etc). Smart idea and there will be probably a target audience for such a project. But this group in the Czech republic is small, too small to make this project a huge success. If there would be after some time thousands of Czech users, how many users could it have, being internationalized and having some decent buzz around itself? Author wants to monetize his project via AdSense, so there is no obstacle in switching to international version, this won’t affect income model. Or if so, in the positive way

Importance of being international is a topic also for projects primary launched in English. Read more about this at AlexWilliams.ca (from Montreal, bi-lingual place). Multilingual versions had to be thought about at the very beginning of the project, internationalization afterthought brings many development problems, as Derek Allard realized on his BambooInvoice application.

On the other hand, after carefully decided internationalization process, you still have to think about costs, which it will bring (e.g. having a Urdu version of your site would be nice, but what if an Urdu-speaking customer will email you with ask for support?) More about these kind of threats at Userscape.

It is good to internationalize, but everything has its limit. Latvian social site Draugiem.lv (one of the most popular sites in the country with almost one million users) used to offer about 20 languague versions, each of them having its own brand. Recently, their dropped down to 7 versions, stripping out those with small amount of users and so ineffective to maintain and monetize. This is wise approach – their Czech version Propratele.cz haven’t received much fan base over here and also the quality of translation haven’t been good. Now all those abandoned-language-version users are forwarded to English-speaking brand Frype.com, which is about to compete with other international social sites.

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