One of the things I recommend to clients is that they decouple adding new languages from regional expansion. Adding language support is often a pre-requisite for success in international markets, but it is by no means the only factor in success. Because it is something you’ll need to do anyway, it is best to get this out of the way before contemplating regional expansion.
Depending on the nature of your business, regional expansion may be relatively easy, or it may be hellishly difficult. The former tends to be true for consumer and SaaS applications that are all digital. The latter tends to be the case for businesses that have an on the ground presence or that are heavily regulated.
Example of the things that you may need to account for in international expansion:
Because of this, the decision to expand into new regions requires high level executive support and coordination. It is easy for companies to get stuck in analysis paralysis in weighing when to launch this effort, whereas adding languages is relatively easy and inexpensive.
The Spanish speaking market in the US is substantial, and in some regions such as Los Angeles, well over 30% of the population speaks Spanish at home (about 15% nationwide). At Lyft, we localized the apps primarily to better serve US users who speak English as a second language. Readiness for international expansion was a consideration but it wasn’t the primary driver behind the effort.
You can think of localizing your product and supporting assets to Spanish as a dry run for future international expansion. Even if you don’t expand into new regions, you’ll be positioning your company to do well in the Latin market. In the process of building out the tooling to support another language, you will be doing much of the work needed to support international expansion.
Adding language support to your app and supporting assets will typically involve the following efforts: