One of the bases of commercial policy in companies is the definition of their target public and the adaptation of the products and services that they offer —and the advertising used— to the profile of the potential customers.

The appearance of the web as a new field of communication, interaction and transactions, enabling any person connected to a computer anywhere in the world to be reached, makes it even more necessary to adapt the business communication to the different potential customers. And this adaptation must be reflected in both the content and the language in which it is expressed.

Internet is a new sales channel for companies, of both global and local reach. When a company gives information, advertises, attends to customers or sells through Internet it must remember that this service can have a very broad territorial reach — it can indeed be global — but the customer is always local, that is to say, has specific characteristics and is linked to a territory, culture and language all of which are specific. Offering goods and services in the customers’ own language is an added value which can contribute to making them loyal, because it allows proximity to be achieved and increases customer satisfaction. And again, the web environment simplifies multilingualism in an extraordinary way, from both the technical and cost viewpoints.

A multilingual web is a good investment because:

Companies approaching customers resident in Catalonia make a good investment when they include a Catalan version in their web, because they increase the satisfaction of a good part of the customers. We can say this on the basis of factors such as:

To find out about the behaviour of Catalan customers when navigating around webs offering both Catalan and Spanish versions, a field study was done with a sample group of companies which were asked to give details of the number of visits received in each linguistic portal and the volume of business generated in each language of their web. The companies questioned were: Condis, Caprabo, Cooperativa Agropecuària de Guissona (CAG), Caixa d’Estalvis i Pensions de Barcelona, “la Caixa”, and Caixa Sabadell. The details obtained show clearly that: