We have built MatthiasWeb in English from the beginning because the WordPress ecosystem is used by people all over the world. Our rebranded company called devowl.io and its website also started in January 2020 only in English, even though we are based in Germany. Today we are proud to announce that devowl.io and all our products are now available in German.
Why English is more important?
WordPress is a content management system that is used all over the world. Our customers come from the USA, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Australia, for example. Therefore, both we and the entire WordPress ecosystem require a primary language that is spoken all over the world – and that is, of course, English. More than 1.5 billion people in the world speak English. That’s about 20% of the total world population. Even so, 20% doesn’t sound like a lot, compared to the 130 million (~1.7% of the population) German-speaking people in the world, that’s a lot.
How many users speak German?
On the other hand, you must always see the specific use case and the number of users who are native speakers of a language other than English. If you focus on the Chinese or Indian market, it is clear that their languages are even more important than English. In our case, even though we have a wide variety of users from all over the world, about 40% of all customers who buy our products come from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. This is a significant proportion of our customers. At the same time we are also from Germany and it is no problem for us to work in German as well.
What is and what is not available in German?
We have spent a lot of time in the last weeks translating things into German. The following part of our services is now available in German:
- Website of devowl.io with all product descriptions
- All plugins are translated into German
- Most relevant blog posts with tips and tricks around WordPress in our blog
- Support form and the support itself (we have already answered in German before, when we realized that you are a German native speaker)
Some parts of our offers are still in English, and there are now plans to translate them into German in the near future:
- Live chat at devowl.io (our support system is not available in German)
- Knowledgebase with all helpful articles
- Developer documentation of our products (if you are a software developer, English should not be an issue for you)
- Old product release notes in the blog
- Product descriptions on codecanyon.net (they are not able to support German)
- Facebook page
- Newsletter
You can see from this list that the translation of products into another language is a more complex issue than it first appears. We have already spent about two full-time weeks to translate the parts that are now available in German. We think this is a good starting point to make the most important parts of our products and services available in German and if you are more at home in the web development world and come from Germany, Austria or Switzerland, you most likely speak English anyway. But if your customers only speak fluent German, they can now use the most important parts of our products in their native language.