What languages do our readers speak – from Google Analytics
I’ve grabbed some Google Analytics statistics about the languages used by visitors to the Atlassian documentation wiki. The information is based on the language setting in people’s browsers. It’s a pretty cool way of judging whether we need to translate our documentation!
The statistics cover a period of 3 months, from 7 September to 7 December 2012.
Summary
Approximately 30% of our readers speak a language other than English. The most popular non-English language is German (approximately 7%), followed by French (approx 2.6%). Japanese is hard to quantify, because we have separate sites for Japanese content.
The pretty picture
This graph shows the results for the top 10 locales:
Top 10 locales via Google Analytics
The grey sector represents a number of smaller segments, each one below 1%. In Google Analytics, I can see them by requesting more than 10 lines of data.
The figures
Here are the figures that back the above graph:
| Locale | Number of visits | Percentage of total | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. |  en-us |
1,951,818 | 66.75% |
| 2. | en-gb |
163,897 | 5.60% |
| 3. | de |
105,526 | 3.61% |
| 4. | de-de |
102,578 | 3.51% |
| 5. | fr |
77,666 | 2.66% |
| 6. | ru |
66,342 | 2.27% |
| 7. | zh-cn |
38,850 | 1.33% |
| 8. | en |
38,826 | 1.33% |
| 9. | es |
37,129 | 1.27% |
| 10. | pl |
30,064 | 1.03% |
More Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a useful tool. If you’re interested in a couple more posts about it, try the Google Analytics tag on this blog. I hope the posts are interesting. 🙂
Posted on 7 December 2012, in language, technical writing and tagged Google Analytics, technical communication, technical documentation, technical writing, translation. Bookmark the permalink. 10 Comments.
ffeathers 
So, what does that mean – will you switch to American English in the documentation? 😉
Hallo Stefan!
Ha ha, well, now that you mention it… Yes, we do have an item in our backlog to convert the documentation to American English. It’s not scheduled yet, but it’s something we plan to do, because most of our customer base uses American rather than British/Australian English. Good pickup. 🙂
Cheers,
Sarah
Hi Sarah,
those are some interesting findings!
Largely backed up by this report by Common Sense Advisory: http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/AbstractView.aspx?ArticleID=2958.
It is a Global Website Assessment Index and provides charts and tables showing language popularity among the world’s most prominent websites. I though you might find it interesting. Inge
Hallo Inge
That’s interesting, thanks! I’ve had a look at the summary of the report, and it would be great to see the charts and tables too. I signed up, and contacted the Common Sense Advisory team saying I’d like access to the report, but they sent a message straight back saying they’d like to phone me about it. That seems like a bit too much process for me. 🙂
Cheers,
Sarah
Hi Sarah,
I’m investigating moving our documentation source to Confluence but can’t find out how to support multiple languages of the documentation. We need to be able to have translated versions of our documentation.
Do you have any tips on this or can you point to any suitable articles that may help on how we would do this. I’ve not managed to find much information on this topic for Confluence and it’s a blocker to the migration at the moment.
Cheers,
Chris
Hallo Chris
I don’t have personal experience of using Confluence with documentation translated into multiple languages. Here are some pointers where you can find some help:
1) An Atlassian Expert partner company, AppFusions, recently talked about their upcoming solution on the Atlassian Answers forum: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/140430/translating-content-with-trados
2) Bitvoodoo, another Atlassian Expert, offers an add-on which may go some or all of the way towards what you need:
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/ch.bitvoodoo.confluence.plugins.language
3) I wrote a post a while ago, describing what I do know and collecting information from others in the field:
https://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/translating-documentation-developed-on-confluence-wiki/
I hope some of this is useful! I’d love to know your findings, and how you decide to continue.
Cheers, Sarah
Hey Chris,
in addition to the options Sarah mentions you can also use my companies Scroll Versions plugin: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.k15t.scroll.scroll-versions
While Scroll Versions is intended to manage concurrent versions of a documentation in a single space, you can also define “Language Versions”, translate and publish the translated content to a new space.
Feel free to email me at stefan AT k15t DOT com if you have any additional questions.
Cheers,
-Stefan
Hallo Stefan!
Wow, that’s pretty cool. I didn’t know about that option in Scroll Versions. Awesome!
Cheers
Sarah
Stefan,
The plug in looks like it solves most of our issues (including context sensitive help).
We will take a closer look at it.
Cheers,
Chris
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