Your global strategy is broken if it starts with English

There’s a quiet assumption embedded in how most companies operate: English is almost always seen as the starting point. I see it play out almost daily in conversations with leadership teams. It shows up in how product specs are written, how campaigns are planned, and how expansion is sequenced. On the surface, this feels efficient. In practice, it constrains growth in ways that are easy to miss until it’s too late. Running Smartling, I spend a lot of time with companies that are either trying to expand globally or wondering why their existing efforts aren’t working as expected. The pattern is consistent. I rarely see translation itself as the limiting factor. What slows companies down is the assumption that everything should originate in English and be adapted later, rather than built to work across markets from the outset. Your customer prefers their native language The reality is that 76% of consumers prefer products with information in their native language, and 40% won’t buy in a language other than their own. Read that again; it means nearly half of your potential customers will walk away from a product that’s translated late, badly, or not at all. Yet most organizations still treat language as a formatting step. You build something, then you translate it. But language shapes the thing itself: how a product is described, how value is framed, and what even gets built. When English is the default, you’re choosing a worldview without realizing you’ve made a choice. I’ve sat in countless planning sessions where teams describe their “global” customer, but everything about that customer (from their pain points to how they evaluate products to their marketing persona) maps back to an English-speaking context. That’s not a neutral starting point. It’s a constraint that quietly filters out entire segments of demand. This shows up most clearly in how companies prioritize markets. I’ve seen leadership teams delay entering high-growth regions, not because the opportu