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Just nine percent of companies can reply properly to e-mail messages written in a foreign language, according to a new survey.
Worldlingo anonymously surveyed the corporations from several different countries from around the world on their response to foreign language e-mail. Each company was sent an e-mail in Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, German or Portuguese.
According to Worldlingo, the question sent to the companies was worded in a manner which ensured a returned e-mail would have to be sent for the question to be answered properly. The e-mail requests were split evenly across each foreign language. For a response to be counted it had to answer the actual question, and be in the same language as the question was asked.
The companies surveyed were the top 100 USA companies from the Fortune 500, the top 50 Japanese, top 20 UK, top 20 French, top 20 German, and the top 10 Australian.
Ninety-one of the companies sent the e-mail did not respond properly to it. According to the survey, many did not realise they were receiving a foreign language e-mail and replied in English saying the e-mail was corrupted. Several provided an answer in the appropriate language, but the answer was to a totally different question.
Several answered the question, but in a different language to that asked, including one that sent an answer in German in response to a query sent in Japanese.
The survey turned up some interesting responses from leading companies, such as this from Walt Disney: "Thank you for your letter. We're sorry, but we are only able to respond to letters in English at this time. Come visit us at Disney.go.com again soon!"
This came from Microsoft: "Hello and thank you for writing to microsoft.com. At this time, we are only able to respond to questions written in English."
Companies were most likely to respond to e-mails written in Spanish or German, but not one responded to a Japanese version of the same e-mail. Worldlingo admitted that the problems encountered with Japanese e-mails may be because many e-mail users don't have support for Japanese text characters enabled in their e-mail applications.
Medical companies responded to 50 percent of the foreign language e-mails they were sent. The lowest responses came in the entertainment, petroleum and manufacturing industries. US and UK companies had the highest response rates.
No French or Japanese companies responded to the e-mails at all.
Less than 50 percent of Internet users today speak English according to Global Reach, yet the NEC Research Institute estimates that 86 percent of Web pages on the Internet are in English.
IDC estimates that people are four times more likely to make a purchase on the Internet if you are able to communicate with them in their native language.
More information at http://www.worldlingo.com/
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