English language web shops often decide to create a version in French or German, but the third most popular language is not some other global language: rather it’s Dutch, which trumps Spanish at third palce.
Strong economies
This is a remarkable finding in the One Hour Translation study, which based its analysis on 4,000 translation projects it received in 2015 and 2016. It is no surprise German and French rank first and second, because the countries are the two largest European economies. Not only that, these languages are also spoken in a whole number of other large countries.
Dutch jumps from fourth to third, because the Dutch and Belgian economies are very strong. Compared to many other European countries, the spending power in these two nations can be considered to be strong. Spanish therefore drops to fourth while Chinese, the most spoken language in the world, is fifteenth with its simplified version and sixteenth with its traditional version.
