Liferay has published research showing that 56% of multilingual consumers have abandoned a purchase because a website or app felt poorly adapted to their language. The survey also found that 82% believe they can identify machine-translated content.
The findings come from Liferay's 2026 Website Localization Report, based on a survey of 800 adults in the US who had used a website, app or digital service in a language other than English in the previous 12 months. The study examined how consumers respond to translated and localised digital content, including its effect on trust, buying decisions and loyalty.
The results suggest basic translation alone often fails to meet multilingual users' expectations. Only 23% of respondents said non-English websites usually feel as though they were written for them, while 90% said they had noticed at least one localisation problem on a website or app.
Liferay's data also points to a commercial impact beyond translation quality alone. Among consumers who rated brands' non-English translations as good or excellent, 54% said they had still abandoned a purchase because of poor localisation.
That distinction between translation and broader adaptation was a central theme in the research. Nearly half of those surveyed, 48%, said they had chosen one company over a competitor because its website or app felt better adapted to their language and culture.
Human Review
The report also explored attitudes towards AI-generated translation. While automated tools have made multilingual publishing easier for brands, respondents still associated stronger outcomes with human input.
Only 20% of consumers credited AI alone for strong localisation, compared with 43% who credited human involvement. That result sits alongside the 82% who said they were confident they could tell when content had been machine translated rather than written or reviewed by a fluent speaker.
The findings reflect a wider challenge for marketing and digital teams expanding content into more languages. A site may function correctly and present translated text, but users may still judge the experience negatively if the tone, phrasing or cultural references feel unnatural.
The survey was conducted through the third-party platform Pollfish. Respondents were adults in the US who had recently used digital services in a language other than English, giving the study a focus on people likely to encounter localised websites and apps in everyday online activity.
Consumer Judgement
The results indicate that multilingual users make fine-grained judgements about digital experiences rather than simply noticing whether content has been translated. They appear to distinguish between text that is understandable and content that feels as though it was created with their language and market in mind.
For brands operating across borders, that gap may affect conversion rates as well as reputation. The finding that more than half of respondents had walked away from a purchase suggests localisation issues can influence decisions at the point of sale, not just longer-term brand perceptions.
Better localisation was also linked to customer choice in competitive situations. When users felt a site or app was better adapted to their language and culture, they said it could influence which brand they selected.
"You can translate every page and technically have everything working, but that doesn't mean the experience feels natural to the person using it," said Bryan Cheung, Co-founder and CMO at Liferay.
"That's where a lot of companies underestimate the difference between translation and localization. Translation gets the content into another language. Localization is what makes it feel natural to the people using it," he said.