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Perhaps you should consider making your web site available in languages other than English. By far,
largest number of non-English speakers have Spanish as their first language. By offering Spanish, your web site can be viewed by nearly 17 million people living in US who don't speak English well. And let's not forget 332 million people with Spanish as their first language (source Ethnologue, 13th Edition) that live outside USA.
Other languages, which you might consider, are Chinese, French, Italian and German. Each of these languages has over a million people, resident in USA, who have poor or no English skills. And think of millions and millions of people outside USA who speak these languages. Chinese is first language of 1,223 million people, (over a sixth of World's population). 72 million people have French as their first language, Italian is spoken by over 37 million people, and German by 98 million people.
Is it difficult to make your web site available in more than one language? Well, no it's not difficult, is answer for most web sites. And cost of translation is relatively modest; particularly when compared with huge increase in potential market. Translation prices are usually based on word count. And number of words displayed on most web sites are actually quite small. Usually somewhere between 500 and 1,500 words, which roughly equates to about US$100 to US$300 per language.
The effort to take resulting pages, written in another language, and display them on your site is usually no more difficult than adding new pages in English.
And there are a number of things that you can do to keep cost and effort down. • Check your site carefully for spelling errors. Especially watch out for horrid homonyns (those words which read same, are spelt differently, but have very different meanings. You know them, words like; there, their, they're; its and it's; who's and whoose; too, to and two; site, cite and sight to name a few. • Keep your language simple, and avoid ambiguities. • Check grammar, and then check it again. • Avoid use of colloquialisms. • Choose several professional translation companies and ask them for quotes. If there are large differences in their prices, ask why.
And if you make regular updates to your web site, most translation companies can offer a maintenance package.
I hope you've found this article useful.
Copyright (c) 2002 Grant McNamara, All Rights Reserved. This article may be freely distributed and published. If you wish to publish the article, out of courtesy, please email me and advise the url. Author Information: Grant McNamara - grant.mcnamara@translateme.co.nz Grant McNamara manages The Translateme Group at www.translateme.co.nz specializing in multilingual software and internet support.
