You work in Biel/Bienne, in Lyss or in Murten. Some of your customers write to you in German, the others in French, and your website exists in one language only. The question comes back at every redesign: should you duplicate everything, and what does it bring in?
Official bilingualism applies only to the authorities
Biel/Bienne is officially bilingual. French and German are the municipality's two official languages, and the City describes a "Biel/Bienne model": whoever opens the conversation chooses the language, the other person adapts (biel-bienne.ch). French and German are official languages in the Canton of Bern as well (State Chancellery of the Canton of Bern).
All of that is binding on the administration. Not on you. No rule requires a private company to have a website in two languages. The language obligations in federal law apply to products — labels, instruction leaflets — not to company websites.
The default answer, for a local trade business working mainly with private customers: one page in German, yes; a fully duplicated site, only if professional clients come into play.
The real cost is the upkeep
You can get a firm quote for the translation itself. Ask for two or three offers: providers bill by the hour, by the word or by the "standard page", a unit that is anything but self-explanatory — have it explained to you before you compare. There is no official rate scale in Switzerland.
That is not where it goes wrong. A bilingual site means twice as many pages to keep up to date. Every service added, every price corrected, every captioned photo: twice. A German version left to one side ends up describing a company that no longer exists, and a half-wrong site does more damage than an openly monolingual one.
Hence a simple rule: do not translate what moves. Services, references, contact details: yes. News, project diary, special offers: one language is enough.
Then there is a cost that appears on no quotation. If your website speaks German, people will write to you and call you in German. If nobody at your company writes correct business German, you have created an expectation you cannot meet. Settle this before the translation. Three ways: someone in the company, or close to it, proofreads the replies; a freelance translator takes on the important quotations; or you say so on the German page — "written reply in German within 48 hours" is better than three days of silence.
Then turn the calculation round. What is an average job worth to you? Compare that with the translation quote plus the annual upkeep: you get the number of jobs you need to win to cover your costs. That is the only honest way to put the question.
What Google's documentation says
Google's documentation on multilingual sites is clear on a few points that come up all the time:
- A separate address for each language. Not a cookie, not a browser setting.
- Google works out a page's language from the visible content, not from the code and not from the address.
- No side-by-side translations on the same page, and no translated menu sitting above content that is still in French.
- No automatic redirect based on the visitor's detected language: it stops users and search engines alike from seeing all the versions.
In practice, a subfolder: yoursite.ch/de/. It is easier to maintain than a subdomain or a second domain name, and Google favours none of the three. The link to the other language points to the equivalent page, never to the home page.
Two misconceptions to clear away. The same information in French and in German is not duplicate content: two languages are not duplicates. And hreflang, the tag that connects the two versions, serves to send the visitor to the right page; it does not move your site up the results. Add it anyway — it is two lines of code to ask your provider for.
What gets you to show up for "Schreiner Biel" is a genuine page in German. And it has to be the right word: the one people type, not the one in the dictionary. Type your trade in German into Google, look at the suggestions and at the titles of the first results from German-speaking Switzerland, ask a German-speaking customer which word they would use. A quarter of an hour, before the first line of translation.
Machine translation is not forbidden. What Google penalises is content produced in bulk, without review and without value (spam policies). A machine translation proofread by someone who knows the trade does not fall into that category. Three checks, even without a word of German: no ß anywhere in the text, since Switzerland writes "ss"; the vocabulary used here, "Offerte" rather than "Angebot"; and the trade terms, where the machine really loses its footing — a ferblantier, a sheet-metal worker, is a Spengler.
Who German actually serves
Pointless if:
- Nobody can handle the second language, neither on the phone nor in writing, and you do not intend to arrange it.
- Your site is a business card for customers who already know you and are looking for an address and a phone number.
- Your area is entirely French-speaking: a hairdressing salon in Saint-Imier does not need a German version.
Necessary if:
- You are targeting local B2B: property managers, general contractors, architects, municipalities. A single German-speaking client who rules you out because they cannot forward your site to their project manager weighs more than traffic does.
- You already answer in both languages on the phone. Your site then says less than you can actually do.
- Your area straddles the language border: Biel/Bienne, the Seeland, the See/Lac district, the Sierre area.
Be wary of the demographic argument, which is very common in the region. People quote the German/French split in the residents' register as if it described a customer base. It comes from an administrative field: the language of correspondence, one of two boxes to tick. Every resident, whatever their mother tongue, is filed under one of the two. "A German-speaking majority" says nothing about how many customers will read your site in German. And the same is true the other way round.
The half-measures
A single page in German. That is not a mistake. But it stops there. One page with its own address, summarising your services, your catchment area and your contact details, written to be read and not translated word for word. Plan for what happens when the visitor clicks elsewhere and lands back in French: say so, or steer them towards the form. It makes you reachable; it will not position you across the whole of German-language search.
The "translate" button. A widget that translates the page inside the browser creates no separate address. It helps out a visitor who has already reached you. You still do not exist in German results.
The Google listing. Keeping a French site and "making the listing bilingual" is the most frequently cited half-measure, and the vaguest. Open your listing and look at what you can actually enter, language by language, before building anything on it. Two levers are immediate: your posts can be written in either language, and reviews in German speak for themselves to German-speaking customers.
How to decide
Three questions, in this order.
- Go back over your last twenty incoming enquiries — emails, calls, form submissions. How many were in German? This count under-reports by design: it does not see the people who left without writing. But it is data of your own, not a population statistic.
- Who replies in German, in writing, the same day? A knock-out question. If the answer is "nobody" and you do not intend to arrange it, stop there.
- Where will your next ten jobs come from? From private customers or from professional clients? B2B tips the balance far faster than B2C, and that question outweighs the first.
One possible rule of thumb, to adjust to your trade: fewer than two enquiries in German out of twenty and no B2B, stay in French. Two to five, one page in German. Above that, or with a German-speaking client in the mix, translate the core pages — services, references, contact.
Then decide who updates the second version, and when. Write it down on the day it goes live. Three months later, open Search Console, Google's free tool that shows which searches people find you through, and look at whether German queries are coming up. That is what will tell you whether your second version is working or asleep.