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> "Meanwhile we were stuck translating into 20 European languages.” - Christophe Sapet (French entrepreneur)"

That's such a bad excuse. There is nothing stopping them from executing in English, or in French in France in the first place. There are five major languages in Europe: English, Spanish, French, German and Italian. No startup starts doing business in >1 market, not even Uber/Google.

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It's not purely a question of translating the website. There might be different laws and customs depending on the domain.

Any company interested in multinational growth should build localization into their app architecture to begin with, anyway. Then just contract out the actual act of translating the strings.

Big difference between building localization into the app architecture and translating the app to 20 languages as a starting point, though.

Sure, but the idea is that you can pay another service to do the translations. The main difficulty is supporting things like right-to-left text and other specific characteristics, but that shouldn't be a problem in Europe only.

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