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Surfing in Tongues

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Around

the globe, English is the language of power: It’s the official tongue in

dozens of nations, from Australia to Zimbabwe. It’s spoken by millions of

people in more than 100 countries. Business and cultural elites everywhere can

manage at least a few words. It’s not surprising, then, that as the Internet

has revolutionized global commerce, English has become the lingua franca of the

World Wide Web.

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But Achtung, baby. This Web is finally living up to its worldwide name. Just

four years ago, English was the native language of 80% of Web users, and nearly

all Netizens could read it to some degree. Today, English is the mother tongue

of less than half the people on the Net, says market researcher Global Reach

Inc. That means merchants had better not talk dollars to German-speaking

cybercitizens who think in Deutsche marks. Attenzione, Web merchants. This is no

passing phase. As the Net penetrates ever-deeper into non-Anglophone societies,

more users won’t know English. By 2004, only one-third of Web users will be

native English speakers, estimates Global Reach. In three years, Internet

spending outside the U.S. will top $914 billion, two-thirds of the world’s

$1.64 trillion in e-commerce, according to researcher International Data Corp (IDC).

Babel.net

Although English

was the firstlanguage of 80% of Web users in 1996, today it’s the mother

tongue of fewer than half.

Web user’s first language:

1996

2000

English

80%

49.90%

Chinese

1%

7.60%

Japanese

4%

7.20%

German

1%

5.90%

Spanish

1%

5%

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Smart Net companies such as Yahoo! Inc. and Amazon.com

are perking up their ears. Yahoo has sites in a dozen tongues, and Amazon hawks

books on Japanese-, French-, and German-language sites. But they’re the

exception. Despite growing multiculturalism online, 55% of U.S.-based Net

companies offer sites only in English, says IDC. Overseas firms are stepping

into the breach. From Asian financial source Boom.com to Central European

city-guide Globopolis.com, foreign-owned sites are creating pages in multiple

languages to reach their customers around the world. Companies reap big benefits

from going global. eBay Inc., for example, runs sites in Germany and France–dominating

those markets, selling twice as many goods as competitors do. And GongShee.com,

an online store for Chinese foods, launched an English-only site last spring,

but sales were sluggish. In September, it added Chinese descriptions, and orders

jumped sevenfold, says Parry Singh, chief executive of EthnicGrocer.com Inc.,

GongShee’s parent.

Building a multilingual e-commerce site is no cinch. The overhaul can cost

anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars, depending on a site’s

size, says Alex S. Pressman, president of Uniscape Inc., a globalization

software company. It’s not just about language: A site must handle orders in

different currencies, characters, and measurements. And there are differences in

the way cultures handle the Web. Some languages, and sites, are read from right

to left. And U.S. Net icons such as mailboxes or shopping carts are unfamiliar

in some countries. Designing Web sites is "different in each culture,’’

says Alison C. Toon, globalization guru for HP’s eight-language IT Resource

Center. So snap to it, Webmasters, and start posting pages that reflect the wide

world of today’s Web.

By ROGER O. CROCKETT in BusinessWeek. Copyright 2001 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc

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