1. I spent a lot of time on a website of one of the big international courier services trying to figure out how to get necessary information.

Their website showed me automatically version in... Dutch (I live in Luxembourg) and there was no possibility to switch languages.

Of course I could use IP Anonymizer but is was much easier for me to go to their competitor. To ascribe a language of the digital product according to the country without offering a language switcher is a very bad thing to do.

2. Marketing department of a company decided to delete all content from their website in German and leave only French texts, because it is easier to maintain one language. There were some texts, which had very good ranking in Google. Needless to say what were the consequences.

3. Recently I was shown an ad on the Facebook of a big fast food restaurant, which was a video of two persons speaking.

It was long, there were no action, static camera and only dialogue of two people.

The language they spoke was actually the language majority in our country speak, but not as their first language. The result was gloomy. The ad had many thouthands views and no likes.

I think, while choosing a language or languages, especially, when working in a country with more than one language it is important to make an analythis (taking into consideration linguistic reality, language policies, and discourse) and then SWОT to see, which consequences this decision may have.

Originally published on Linkedin 

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Tetyana Karpenko-Duebbers