Publish in every language you sell in, or admit you don't sell there

Plenty of European companies sell into five or six countries and publish in one language. The English-only blog is defended as pragmatic: everyone in business reads English, translation is expensive, and the effort is better spent elsewhere.

The first claim is half true and the conclusion does not follow from it. People read English fine. They search in their own language, and increasingly they ask assistants questions in their own language too — and if nothing in your category exists there, you are absent from the entire consideration stage in a market you claim to serve.

Search behaviour is more local than reading ability

The gap that matters is not comprehension. It is that a Finnish operations manager researching a problem at nine in the morning types the Finnish phrase, because that is the phrase they think in.

Whoever has written the Finnish page wins that moment, and it is frequently not the best product. It is often a local competitor with a worse offering and a page in the right language. You lose before any comparison happens, which is the most expensive way to lose.

Translation is now cheap enough to change the decision

The old calculus was real. Two hundred euros a post to translate, times four posts, times five languages, is four thousand a month before anyone has reviewed anything, and it is genuinely hard to justify against a market you have not proven yet.

That number has collapsed. Machine translation of the current generation handles business prose competently, and the marginal cost of a fifth language is now close to the marginal cost of the second. The decision that used to be "which one market can we afford" is now "which markets do we actually want", which is a much better question.

We publish this blog in every language we operate in for exactly that reason, and the incremental cost is small enough that not doing it would be an argument about principle rather than money.

Where machine translation still fails

Three places, reliably.

Idiom and register drift. A sentence that is dry and confident in English becomes stiff or oddly formal in Finnish, and the effect accumulates across a post until it reads as foreign. This is why we write each locale natively against the same argument rather than translating sentence by sentence — the structure carries across, the sentences do not.

Domain terms with local legal or regulatory meaning. Words like "invoice", "contract", "notice period" or "bankruptcy" often have precise local equivalents that a general translator will approximate. Getting these wrong is worse than not publishing, because it makes you look like an outsider in exactly the moment you were claiming expertise.

Examples and references. An article that cites American price points, American company names, and an American regulator reads as translated no matter how good the sentences are. Swapping references costs almost nothing and does more for credibility than another round of polish.

The technical part everyone skips

Publishing the same post in five languages without telling search engines how they relate produces five pages competing with each other.

Each language version needs `hreflang` annotations pointing at every other version including itself, a self-referencing canonical rather than one pointing at the English original, and a place in a sitemap that lists the alternates. Get this wrong and the usual result is that only the English version is ever surfaced, which produces the conclusion that translation did not work.

This part is genuinely fiddly, it is invisible when broken, and it is where most multilingual blogs quietly fail. It is also completely mechanical, which makes it a good thing to automate and a bad thing to leave to whoever pastes the post in.

The honest rule

Publish in a language if you can support a customer in it. If somebody reads your Finnish post, writes in Finnish, and gets an English reply from a support address, the translation has cost you more than it earned.

The blog is a promise about how you operate. Extend it to the languages where that promise is true, and be honest about the rest — a market you publish in but cannot serve is worse than a market you left alone.