April 28, 2000, Volume 1, Number 17

English: The Language of the Internet for Retail Sales?
BY Michael Tubridy

  English is not only the common language of business and commerce, but now, according to some observers, the common language of the Internet as well.¹ But in a medium famous for having few if any restraints on its sense of innovation, how true is this assertion?

The question holds more than academic interest to the U.S. shopping center community. Many U.S. retailers have expanded abroad over the last decade, and now many American developers are looking internationally either to start projects by themselves or to form partnerships with companies in the host countries. Retail sales and other economic data in these other countries represent basic information that allow American-based companies to gauge the feasibility and potential of new areas of operations.

If you want this information, how easy do foreign countries make it for you to obtain it? To test how much English functions as a common frame of reference, ICSC decided to examine the Web sites of European governmental institutions to determine how many contain retail sales data. We then asked two questions: first, is there a Web site from a national source with retail sales information available in English? Second, is the English-language version of these data different from that given in the native language? As an ancillary goal, we hoped to discover how readily these nations disseminated business information. The following results, to our knowledge, represent the state of affairs that exists today.

This report examined sites for 19 European countries covered by the ICSC publication Econ-Stats, in all of which a language other than English predominated among its citizens.² For this reason, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland were excluded. (Please see Table 1 below.)

Table 1 European Retail Sales on the Web: English Vs. Foreign-Language Versions

First, we noticed that, contrary to the reigning perception, retail sales data were not always available in English on national sites—and sometimes not even in the official language (but that's another story). Only in a minority of instances—nine out of the 19 countries in our sample—was this number available. In the other 10 cases, the numbers were either unavailable on the governmental site or were found instead on the Web site of the Organization for Economic Coordination and Development (OECD) (www.oecd.org). Switzerland outlined an especially singular path to its retail sales numbers. The site, which offers data in German and French (though not in Italian, the third of its official languages), contains a link for data in English. When the document is retrieved, however, the researcher finds that it is written in simultaneous French and German translations instead.

For the nine countries that provided retail sales in English on a Web site, the material often differed from what was offered in the sites' native-language version. Five countries split in what they offered English and non-English users, but in all of these instances the native speakers received more data or explanatory material. The Czech Republic provided a table in English, but no additional commentary. The Swedish site summarized the data, but didn't provide a table with the numbers. The Norwegian breakdown of retail sales was more detailed than what was available in English. Germany and Italy offered explanatory notes on the data in their native language, but not in English.

Only four nations—Austria, Belgium, Iceland, and Portugal—contained no material differences between the English and non-English versions.

The above analysis highlights a couple of points. First, ready availability of business information provided by a national government—a situation taken for granted in the United States—does not always exist elsewhere. Second, English seems not quite the common language of the business world that conventional wisdom holds, as far as the Internet is concerned. In the countries discussed above, researchers might want to follow the metaphorical equivalent of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do"—at least if you hope to access all the information that your counterpart in another country may have.

¹ "Will English Remain the Language of the Internet?" The Book and the Computer (December 1998). (www.honco/net/archive/rt-2.html)

² The ICSC publication Econ-Stats, containing economic data for these and other nations, can be found at http://www.icsc.org/srch/rsrch/econstats/index.html.