Required EU Languages

In her entry on brand management, Leonor gave a link to the 4000+ languages of the world, all of which have speakers buying things and thus being prospective consumers. The largest language groups are obviously interesting for all companies, but sometimes even small languages are worth noticing.

I recently spent a few days in Reykjavik, which is an interesting city. Iceland, with its 300,000 people speaking Icelandic, is number #13 in the GDP per capita list of CIA Worldbook https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html. Reykjavik was definitely showing the its high position in the GDP list, with its very nice restaurants and fashion and jewelry boutiques. All the young and middle-age people seemed to speak very good English (much like in my home country Finland), and all information was available also in English. But everything was also written in Icelandic – of course.

So, even a small amount of native speakers can be a good reason for translation, if those natives are affluent. Or who knows? Maybe after a few decades everyone in Iceland is happy to receive all their information in English? I would not bet on that, however.

As regards to the European Union, it has legislated what must be translated if you want to sell your goods and services to an EU country. Here are some links for more information:

http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/l32036.htm is the European Union site which gives a summary on the EU legislation. To get some of the legalese in a more comprehensible text, you can have a look at the summary put together by the Australians at http://www.export61.com/export-tutorials.asp?ttl=eteu. And Sophie Hurst of SDL has put together a good summary at http://www.sdl.com/printer-friendly/localization-information/white-papers-articles/white-papers-list/white-papers-europe-legal.htm.

To summarize all these summaries: if you want to sell your product in the EU, always translate consumer information, such as user manuals, labels etc., into the local EU language.

As a final note: My sister in Finland had just bought a new dishwasher. It came with a bunch of manuals in different EU languages. Although ecologically it seemed a waste of paper, that is what one gets in EU now from big manufacturers. It seems to be cheaper to deliver manuals in several EU languages to consumers, instead of sending just one printed manual in the correct language. A good process in logistics might change that...