For companies who realize they need to broaden their website appeal to an audience that speaks different languages, they should ask themselves “Is our website ready for translation”.
According to mtmlinguasoft.com, the international growth of web usage, and of web usage in different languages, has continued to explode. The earlier white paper contained this statistic from Internet World Stats:
Between 2000 and 2008, web usage in English grew by a little over 200%, but other languages saw much higher rates of growth: French over 400%; Spanish over 600%, Chinese over 800%, and Russian and Arabic over 1000%.
The statistics quoted in our new paper are even more startling:
Between 2000 and 2013, web usage in English grew by about 470%, but other languages saw much higher rates of growth: Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Malay have all seen growth rates of 1,000-3,000%; Arabic use has increased by well over 5,000%.
English users now make up less than a third of all web users globally.
In other words, it is more likely than ever that a website will be translated at some point and it is more important than ever to design websites that are translation ready.
