Should your website be in Hindi, or in a regional language?

This comes up in most rebuild conversations, usually as a request for a Google Translate widget in the header. That widget is the wrong answer to a reasonable question.

Why the widget fails

Machine translation of technical content produces confident nonsense. Specification tables come out wrong. Product names get translated when they shouldn’t be. Certification names get mangled.

It also does nothing for search. The translated text is generated in the visitor’s browser, so search engines never see it and never index it. You get the awkwardness without the reach.

When a second language is genuinely worth it

• Your buyers are small traders or shop owners. Building materials, agricultural inputs, consumer distribution. Here regional language often outperforms English.
• You sell to farmers or rural businesses directly. Clear case.
• You recruit locally at scale. A careers page in the local language reaches people the English one doesn’t.
• Your competitors have done it and you can see them ranking. Check before assuming.

When it isn’t

If you sell to procurement departments, engineers, exporters or hospitals, your buyers work in English all day. The specification is in English. The tender is in English. Adding Hindi adds maintenance and reaches nobody new.

We’d rather see that budget go into publishing your full product range properly. That reliably returns more.

If you do it, do it properly

Real translation by a person who knows the industry. Separate URLs for each language so search engines can index both. Hreflang tags telling Google which version suits which visitor. A clear language switch, labelled with the language name. Flag icons confuse more than they help.

And a decision about scope. Translating the five pages that matter is sensible. Translating four hundred product pages usually isn’t, and half translated sites look worse than English only ones.

The middle path most businesses should take

Keep the site in English. Put the regional language where the conversation actually happens. Your WhatsApp replies, your printed material, your sales calls, your Google Business Profile description.

That covers the real communication gap without doubling the maintenance burden of the website.

Written by Sameer Gaikwad, founder of Buildgin. Thirty three years in electrical power systems across global MNCs, now applying the same condition monitoring habit to websites.