Foreign Domains

[Sparhawke]

I am from England, I speak English Fluently and do not have a clue about German, Dutch or whatever and would guess that many English like myself in those countries would like an English domain in .de or .fr or whatever...

What are your thoughts on English spellings in foreign domains like Birthday.fr instead of anniversaire.fr?

 

[Venga]

If you target a British audience living abroad, EnglishWord+CountryCode should work well.

But for a native audience, it mainly depends on the word and how widely English is spoken WELL in that specific country, if it is a very popular English word, it may work even better than a clumsy translation of that term (i.e. in tech). And while "Birthday" is probably understood almost everywhere these days, I doubt that in Germany many people know what a "Convertible" is, despite the general madness there about cars.

 

[SiberForum]

I suppose English is international language and a lot of people will understand that. Good idea so far

 

[Kate]

As a rule ccTLDs should be registered in the local languages. Very common English keywords like 'job' can be valuable.

What are your thoughts on English spellings in foreign domains like Birthday.fr instead of anniversaire.fr?

Stay away.

 

[Coopey]

As a rule ccTLDs should be registered in the local languages. Very common English keywords like 'job' can be valuable.

+1 on this comment

Also, you are unlikely to be able to register a .fr domain without a French address or French citizenship (I know it was only an example, but just a heads-up before you pursue it).

But that's assuming you plan on buying particular ccTLDs for resale, you didn't say whether you plan on selling on these hypothetical domains or developing on them. Whilst I'm with Kate above on the buy-for-resell being a general no, for development it's a whole different game.
If you plan to target ex-pats in foreign countries, I would think that such sites might be good to make on local ccTLDs- but this is not my area of expertise so I would not know. I would assume type-in traffic would be close to nil, so you would need to advertise anyway (which you could do with a usually cheaper .com or .co.uk).

For a quick, easy way of looking at search volume, you can try going to Google Insights, setting the region as the country you're interested in and entering some English terms to see what comes up.
I entered 'birthday' and 'anniversaire' for France and got this. It seems that all the recorded searches for 'birthday' were in the term 'Happy Birthday'.
You could try different English language searches on different countries with various potential ex-pat searches and see if anything comes up good...?

 

[Smith]

What are your thoughts on English spellings in foreign domains like Birthday.fr instead of anniversaire.fr?

You can do ok traffic wise with slang and adult names as there is some crossover, but as others have stated always go for local language when available.

tip. if you're going to go for local language, make sure you get the grammar correct, often times a literal translation of 2 words is incorrect.

 

[DnEbook]

consider looking into idns , domains in their own language script are about to go mainstream

 

[Venga]

See industry news -> sale of software.de