The web's future in many languages

English may be the dominant force on the Internet, but this is rapidly changing. Asia has twice as many Internet users as North America, and more than half of the search queries on Google come from outside the United States. The New York Times reports on an engineer from India, Ram Prakash Hanumanthappa, who has branched out well beyond the norm by developing Quillpad, an online service for typing in 10 South Asian languages. Users spell out words of local languages phonetically in Roman letters, and Quillpad's predictive engine converts them into local-language script. The newspaper said Quillpad has attracted interest from the cell phone maker Nokia and the attention of Google, which has since introduced its own transliteration tool.

"Gone are the days in which you can launch a web site in English and assume that readers from around the globe are going to look to you simply because of the content you're providing," said Zia Daniell Wigder, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research, an online research company.

In the last two years, Yahoo and Google have introduced more than a dozen services to encourage India's web users to search, blog, chat and learn in their own languages. Microsoft has built its Windows Live bundle of online consumer services in seven Indian languages, and Facebook has enlisted volunteers to translate its social networking site into Hindi and other regional languages.

For more on this global trend:
- see this NYTimes.com article

Related Articles:
Translation management news from FierceContentManagement