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Comment by eiaoa | Hacker News Reader

> Size of the market, US and China have #1 and #2 economies. Start-ups in India seem to have similar problem as Europe, given multi-lingual nature of mass market.

I've never done internationalization, but I'm surprised language could be such a barrier. Couldn't you just hire a team of translators on a contract basis?

Maybe theres's some market for internationalization-as-a-service.

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Merely translating the interface is not the main problem IMO. Word of mouth, TV, newspaper, youtube channels and other "influencers"... Everything more or less stops at the border. There are also significant cultural differences that might make it difficult to make your product appealing to the whole market.

In the US if you get the hype going about your startup, get mentioned by a few high-profile newspapers, news programs and Instagram celebs you can ramp up pretty quickly. In Europe your brand can be mainstream enough that it becomes a common name in Italy while at the same time nobody ever heard of you in Germany.

Ever heard of Skyblog? I remember that in the early 2000's it was basically French Myspace. It was spawned by a French radio but became super popular on its own, all the French teens back then had a "Skyblog" (and an MSN messenger account). How many non-francophone Europeans have heard of a Skyblog? Not many I'd wager. Actually I doubt that even today's French teenagers know what a Skyblog is, they're using Instagram and whatever else while Skyblog is joining the Minitel as a footnote in the history of the French internet.

It's not only language, it is also a huge cultural differences. Swedes have as much in common with the Portugese as Americans with Columbians - really not much. Also very different legislations, banking systems, difficult tax handlings and so on. How do you even handle support for 23 different languages as a startup? Do sales and marketing in 23 languages?

all of the EU has had the similiar banking system[1] for ages now. Tax handling can be an issue, but i won't see how this is different between the different taxes between US states.

Also, culture and language are major barriers in the european market, legislation less so (especially if you ship physical products).

1: https://ec.europa.eu/info/business-economy-euro/banking-and-...

Doubtful. It's less about verbatim translation of text from one language to another, and more about changing your product's design + data architecture to accomodate the possibility of more than one language. It's a lot of overhead. You now need to answer questions like: "Do I need to add a dropdown to select languages? How would I store the different texts for each language for different parts of my product? How would I have to change the visual design of my product now that I have to account for translations in other languages being wider / narrower than my core language? What about right-to-left languages?"

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