For its “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy” study, the research firm CSA Research surveyed 8,709 consumers across 29 countries. Seventy-six per cent said they prefer to buy when the product information is in their own language, and forty per cent said they would not buy from a website in another language at all. The preference held even among respondents who spoke English confidently. For a business, those are not language statistics. They are a ceiling on how much of a market you can actually sell to.
Any UK company eyeing overseas growth eventually meets this wall. Selling in English into a market that prefers its own language quietly caps the addressable audience, however good the product is. And of all the content a business has to adapt, video and audio are where the gap shows most, because a recorded voice cannot be swapped out as easily as a line of text on a page.
The step that gets left out of the plan
Market-entry plans usually cover the obvious things: translate the website, adapt the packaging, sort the logistics. The marketing video, the training that onboards a new local team, the audio in an app, all tend to be treated as an afterthought, on the assumption that a subtitle or a caption will do. For anything meant to persuade or instruct, it usually will not. To land in a new market, that audio has to be re-recorded in the local language, not just written underneath the original.
Why it is more work than it looks
The instinct is to picture one extra translation per country. The reality is a chain of decisions. A voice has to be cast for each market, because tone and pace that work in one language can fall flat in another, and expectations shift even within a language: European and Latin American Spanish are not interchangeable. The brand has to sound like itself across every version, so the company is recognisable rather than accidentally different in each territory. And then there are the files themselves, often dozens of them, each with its own deadline and its own chance to go wrong.
For a lean team, doing all of that market by market, with a separate freelancer and studio in every country, turns a growth project into an administrative one. Version control alone can swallow the timeline, and mistakes tend to hide in the gaps between suppliers. It is why businesses scaling into more than a couple of markets usually hand the recording to a single provider of voice over services, so that casting, recording and quality control run through one workflow, with one standard applied to every language rather than a different result in each one.
A sensible way to approach it
You do not have to do everything at once. Start with the markets that actually move the numbers rather than every country on the map. Ask to hear and approve the shortlisted voices before anything is recorded, so a poor fit is caught early. Decide once how the brand should sound, and hold every version to it. And weigh the spend against the revenue those markets represent, because getting the audio right is usually a small line against the size of the opportunity it unlocks.
The businesses that succeed abroad are rarely the ones with the best English. They are the ones that sound local to the customer in front of them. Getting the voice right in each market is a modest part of a growth budget, and it often decides whether the rest of that budget reaches the people it was meant for.