Serving international visitors online: which languages, and how far

The point almost nobody raises

Morocco co-hosts the 2030 World Cup with Spain and Portugal. That sentence is usually read as sports news. For a Moroccan website it carries commercial news: the two other host countries are Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking.

That does not mean translating your site into Spanish tomorrow morning. It means the usual hierarchy — French, then English, then we will see — is worth re-examining for businesses that will receive passing trade from southern Europe. Spanish is already not a marginal language in the north of the country.

What a language actually costs

The cost of a language is not the translation quote. It is everything that follows.

• Every update doubles. A new price, a photograph, an opening time: in every language, or the versions diverge and the wrong one ends up being the one Google shows.
• Each language wants its own address. A version with no URL of its own does not exist to a search engine. That is a structural decision taken at build time, not a setting.
• Each language creates an expectation. A visitor reading your page in Spanish will write to you in Spanish. If nobody can answer, the translation cost money in order to produce a disappointment.

How to decide, concretely

Three questions, in this order. They are almost always enough.

• Who already writes to you? Look at your messages, your reviews, your calls over the past twelve months. A language that already turns up unprompted is the first to add. It is the only data that is genuinely yours.
• Who can answer? A language with nobody to follow up should not be published. Two languages you can hold beat four you have abandoned.
• What has to be translated? Almost never the whole site. The pages that decide a visit — what you do, where you are, what it costs, how to book — deserve a real translation. A blog post from 2023 does not.

What is better left untranslated

Translating less, but properly, is almost always the right answer. Three cases where abstaining is the better call:

• Archives. Content you would not refresh in your own language does not deserve translating into another.
• Legal notices and terms. An approximate translation of a legal text is worse than none. It commits you to wording nobody has weighed.
• Anything machine-translated and published unread. It shows, it damages credibility at the exact moment credibility matters, and on a booking page it costs the booking.

Beyond language: what a foreign visitor expects

A translated page inside a journey that is not translated serves nothing. Four points close the loop.

• A form that accepts a foreign phone number. A field demanding a Moroccan format rejects precisely the customer you were trying to reach.
• Legible prices. Showing dirhams is normal; giving the order of magnitude in a familiar currency saves a round trip, and above all saves the tab from being closed.
• A workable way to pay or book. See accepting online payments in Morocco. The bank application starts months ahead, not weeks.
• An address that opens a map. A visitor who does not know the city will not decode a written address: they want directions.

Frequently asked

And at Noor Studio Agency?

We always start with the client’s inbox rather than a market study: the language people already write to you in is a free, dated, honest signal. We have not yet needed anything else to decide.