“Think globally, act locally.” That’s a motto that has guided many of us for years, and while that’s still important, when it comes to your business, you can now act globally, too.
Use of the Internet is exploding in foreign countries, with websites being translated into hundreds of different languages. If you’ve got something to sell, promote or proclaim, consider creating sites in multiple languages, and treat them as you would your English-language presence. Get the gist of your message to online consumers in words the audience can understand.
Statistics bear out that more and more businesses are translating their sites from English to the language spoken by their target markets. The foreign language Internet is “growing at a rapid rate,” according to Internet World Stats (IWS), which compiles usage and population statistics.
Just look at the stat-keepers’ numbers for growth in these languages from 2000-2011:
- Arabic: 2501.2 percent growth
- Russian: 1825.8 percent growth
- Chinese: 1478.7 percent growth
- Portuguese: 990.1 percent growth
By comparison, English-language sites have grown by only 301.4 percent during that time period.
IWS also ranked the top 10 Internet users by language as of 2010. Not surprisingly, English was number one with 536 million users, followed by Chinese (444 million), Spanish (153 million), Japanese (99 million) and Portuguese (82 million).
Looks like there are some opportunities out there to reach online consumers in the spoken word of their country of origin.
This means online moderation is going global, too. Communicating effectively with your non-English-speaking audience probably shouldn’t be your only concern. You should still be protecting information found on your site — no matter the native language.
Assume that your online community could face potential bullies or be subject to illegal activity in any global market. User generated content that is inappropriate or uncivil is bad no matter in which language it appears.
If your site targets visitors from all over the world, we have the expertise to handle a number of different languages, including Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Gaelic and Portuguese. And we will be expanding our ability to handle moderation of more languages as the need arises.
At Scout Moderation we aim to be the social support for multilingual content moderation.
