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English may be the so-called lingua franca of the World Wide Web, but consider this: three-quarters of the world’s population speaks no English whatsoever. Online, over 460 million internet users communicate in English. Yet there are over 1.5 billion internet users across the globe, which means that over a billion web users claim a language other than English as their native tongue. That’s a lot of people. The Web is a linguistic labyrinth and the need for businesses to talk to customers in their own language can’t be overstated.
@bkmacdaddy tweeted this article earlier today. I thought I would share this with everyone.
The above information is not only good to know for the SEO/SEM and web designers/developers, but is good for anyone that creates their own site or blog. Always keep in mind, that not everyone speaks English, if your site could be helpful in other countries, make sure that the site can be translatable in the five major languages spoken/read on the web. Those are English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish.
About James
Very interesting post and point. Seems a lot of place learn and adapt to english but if this is true as more come online language translation will become more important at least for those that seek that audience. I work for a large global company and we do most of our work in english but we do see to translate a lot of the web content to support other users. But we always start with english.