81% of users switch languages to find information, but most only buy in their native tongue. That gap means localization has to go deepest exactly where a purchase happens.
Language preferences shape online behavior in ways that are easy to underestimate. This is one of the reasons translating your website matters for internet users today. Whether someone is browsing for information, talking to friends, or making a purchase, the language they use changes how they experience your site and what they decide to do on it.
1. Browsing for information and reading news
81% of internet users who switch languages do so to browse for information or read news. This highlights the importance of offering content in multiple languages to capture a broader audience.
- Top Performing Countries: Luxembourg and Slovenia lead with 96% of users utilizing other languages for information.
- Lowest Engagement: Italy and the UK trail with only 68-70%, suggesting room for growth.
Action Step: Make sure informational content reads naturally in each language, not just correctly. AI Glot handles this at volume, and our CSV translation workflow keeps your formatting intact.
2. Communicating with friends and acquaintances
62% of users communicate online in a language other than their own. In the UK and Ireland, this figure jumps to 77% and 83%, respectively.
Action Step: Support multilingual communication on your platform. Reliable translation software helps users interact without friction, which makes your community easier to join.
3. Online shopping: Searching or buying products and services
Over half of internet users (57%) use another language for shopping activities. Countries like Malta and Cyprus show impressive adoption rates of 80% and 85%.
- Most users prefer switching languages occasionally rather than constantly.
- Low Engagement in Certain Regions: Romania, Belgium, and Bulgaria show lower adoption rates (41-48%).
Action Step: Translate your e-commerce platform for the languages your visitors actually use. AI Glot translates product descriptions and checkout copy across platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Wix, and it’s built for when you need to translate product catalogs at scale.
4. Professional Communication
52% of users engage in professional communication using a language other than their native one. This varies widely, from 42% in Belgium to 80% in Malta.
Action Step: Add multilingual support to your business tools so communication stays clear and professional across markets.
5. Other online activities
While activities like online banking and entertainment see lower multilingual engagement, opportunities still exist:
- Health and Education: Varying usage across countries indicates potential for targeted translation efforts.
- Entertainment: Limited use suggests niche strategies for localized content could capture specific audiences.
Action Step: Identify less frequent but high-value activities on your site and prioritize their translation. This can differentiate your platform in competitive markets.
6. Frequency of language use in online activities
Most users prefer to occasionally switch languages rather than doing so frequently or all the time. For instance, 41% use another language occasionally for communicating with friends versus 21% who do so frequently or always.
Action Step: Offer flexible language options that users can switch between based on their needs, without overwhelming them.
7. Country variations in activities
Countries like Cyprus, Malta, and Luxembourg show high multilingual engagement, averaging over 6.5 activities in different languages. In contrast, Belgium, France, the UK, and the Netherlands average four or fewer.
Action Step: Tailor your multilingual strategy to each target country’s behavior. AI Glot can help customize translations to fit local preferences, ensuring relevance and effectiveness.
8. Socio-demographic considerations
Men, younger users, those with higher education, and urban residents are more likely to engage in multilingual online activities.
Action Step: Analyze your audience demographics to prioritize which languages to support, and translate for the segments that actually make up your traffic. AI Glot can translate a full set of pages into every language on your list in one job.
Acting on the segments you just identified
Knowing which audience prefers which language is only useful if translating for them is cheap enough to actually do:
- Test a segment before committing to it: run a new language in Lite mode first, at a fraction of the cost, and move it to Standard once it proves out.
- Name the pages that matter to that segment, in one sentence, rather than translating the whole site to reach the part of it a demographic actually reads. For the SEO side of that targeting, see our SEO website translation guide and how to rank for localised keywords.
- Keep the brand vocabulary steady as you add each new segment’s language, so the fifth language you add reads like the first.
Conclusion
Language shapes what people read, buy, and trust online. Translating content in the languages your visitors actually use turns browsing into engagement, and engagement into conversions.
A multilingual strategy that holds up needs a glossary that keeps your brand’s terms and voice consistent as you add languages. Tools like AI Glot apply that glossary automatically. If you’re weighing AI versus human translation, most teams land on a hybrid: AI Glot for the volume, human review on the pages that matter most.
The business benefits of website translation article covers how to prioritize which languages and content types to tackle first.