In today’s highly globalized world language and cultures often integrate to form one very diverse community. Yes it is true that English is an international language, that is spoken in all countries but if the stats are to go by then English really is not the most popular language as far as number of speakers.  It is proven that English comes in a close second to Chinese which is the world’s leader as far as number of speakers with more than 800 million speakers of the language globally. English comes in second with only about 500-600 million speakers.

In a recently concluded survey it proves that even though most people speak their mother tongue and English very well, they would rather prefer to read a document in their own mother tongue than to do so in English.  This fact never fails to amuse me because the survey also concluded that only 27% of the world’s internet users have their mother tongue or First language as English. So what about the other 77%?

The other 77% comprises of the world’s top ten languages besides English and they are, Chinese Simplified, Russian, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Arabic Modern Standard and Portuguese.  Now if only 27% of the world’s internet users are comfortable in reading English then what about the other 77%. If I was in a business meeting and these numbers were to pop up I know where my vote is going. If not translating into the 10 most popular languages besides English I would’ve at least requested for it to be done in about 5 other languages besides English. As that keeps me above the 50-60% of the internet users globally who can go onto my website and read and understand in a language that they’re comfortable with.

It is imperative to have a website in various languages today as that’s the way it works. Google have been clever enough by introducing their own version of an automated translation, although far from perfect it still gives the average user an option. Yahoo too has followed with Babel Fish their own automated translation software, and so have various others. However these are automated Machine Translation and aren’t the best way forward, although it still is good enough to use on some level. You will see an in-depth difference in my next blog that brings out the difference between Machine translation and Human translation.

We at Translations Galore are vastly experienced in translating websites. We have translated over hundreds of websites into various language pairs. Besides localizing website text, we also offer voice over, Design and Audio services in all the languages we provide for your website. Translations Galore takes great care in translating and localizing the content of each website and also in assuring that the pages are formatted properly so they look exactly like the original web pages. Translation can be handled directly by overwriting the source file, ensuring that the code stays intact, or as a side-by-side translation of the text in MS Word or MS Excel for the webmaster to format. Call us at 443. 602. 9990 for a free quote as we’re also running various promotions for website translations.