Best Languages to Translate Your Video Ads Into (2026)

For most e-commerce and DTC brands expanding out of English, the highest-return first three are Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and German: two very large, comparatively cheap media markets, and one small, expensive, high-conversion one. Translate a proven creative into those, confirm it travels, then widen.

Tier 1 — start here

• Spanish — the largest addressable audience outside English, and Latin American CPMs are a fraction of US ones. Decide early between Iberian and Latin American Spanish; they are not interchangeable in an ad.
• Portuguese (Brazil) — heavy social-video consumption and low media costs make it the cheapest place to learn whether your hook survives translation at all.
• German — expensive CPMs, but Europe's deepest pool of buying power, and an audience that drops off from English-language creative more than most marketers assume.

Tier 2 — expand once Tier 1 pays

• French — one European French dub reaches France and much of francophone Africa; Belgium, Switzerland and Québec have their own voices, and Québec its own vocabulary, so give it a separate version
• Italian — strong DTC market at mid-range CPMs
• Dutch — small but affluent and highly digital; localised ads outperform English ones by a wider margin than the country's English fluency suggests
• Polish — fast-growing e-commerce with some of the lowest CPMs in the EU

Tier 3 — high upside, more variance

• Arabic — Gulf markets pair high spend with low creative competition; the dialect choice matters
• Turkish — young, mobile-first, cheap to reach
• Hindi — enormous reach at very low CPMs, with lower average order values to match

How to sequence it

Take one proven winner — not a new creative — and translate it into two or three Tier 1 languages. Run each for two weeks at the same budget with the same offer, so language is the only variable. Cut what doesn't move, then repeat with your next-best creative in the markets that did.

The most common mistake is treating localisation as a creative test. Translating an ad that doesn't already convert in its home market only buys you a more expensive way to find that out.