I have a website (not this one) with contents suitable to translate in almost any language. It does not contain many pages, because a page for this website takes ages to create. Why does it take so long ? Because of the particular subject of the website.

On the other hand the pages are of high quality, the English version attracts visitors from all over the world. The pages will not get outdated any time soon either. So I figured out it might be worth to translate the website to other languages in order to generate a bit more advertising revenue.

With these translations I am following a typical dutch tradition: dutch companies are good at earning money by scaling up. If I would have been British or American I might have concentrated on making more pages or attracting more visitors instead of translating what I have so far.

For me, the question was to which languages the website should be translated first. The first option that came to my mind was to translate the website to languages with cheap translators available. But cheap translators usually mean low wages and low wages often mean that advertisers don't want to pay much for adverts.

So I choose for the second option: translating the website to languages with reasonable priced translations and a large population, preferably with a high gross domestic product (GDP): German, Spanish, Chinese. I used Wikipedia to get an idea of the number of speakers of each language and their total earnings, such that I could rank each language.

Apart from ranking languages and GDPs there is another factor that influences the success of your translated website. This is the competition factor. Website compete for attention, so a website will attract less visitors if there is similar content within that language. Clearly for english website this competition is enormously. In general, the bigger the language, the larger the competition between websites.

Websites in small languages can also be attractive for advertisers because they target a specific group of people, with a specific location. A good example might be Norwegian. I still have to experience how this will work out. My first impression is that translating my website to Japanese was not a bad bet either. Pages will probably be found just as easy in Google as corresponding pages of my English website.