Michael Haislip: Professional Millionaire

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This little foreign girl cries at night because she can’t read your English-only site. Shame on you.

I asked myself a question last week. “How many potential readers am I losing by only writing in English?” When I first asked the question, I didn’t think much about it. But since then, I’ve become more convinced that English-only sites are losing a potentially huge audience.

My Reasoning

The general assumption seems to be that everyone who uses the Internet also speaks English. However, there is no empirical data to verify that. So, after a bit of research, I discovered the stone-cold facts. I found a chart that breaks down the languages spoken on the Internet along with a bit of statistical data. It seemed that I was onto something.

While many Internet users are bilingual, I reason that most aren’t. If 30 percent of users are primarily English speakers, that means 70 percent of users aren’t. That’s a huge potential readership being lost to the language barrier.

Think Like a Non-English Speaker

Most people would suggest using one of the existing translation services, such as Babel Fish or Google Translate. This is bad for several reasons:

1. Why would a non-English speaker find your English-only site when he’s using non-English search queries?
2. Assuming he somehow finds your site, how long would he hang around trying to read a foreign language? A user who can’t find immediate value is more apt to click the back button rather than a “Translate This” button.
3. Even if he manages to translate the page, it does you, the webmaster, little good. As far as I know, neither Google nor Babel Fish cache translated pages. Foreign language users would be forced through this arduous process every time.

In short, we can’t expect foreign language speakers to visit English-only sites. A webmaster needs to generate foreign language versions of his site. Unfortunately, most of us don’t speak 12 languages. What to do?

The Solution

After some research, I found very little help. For WordPress users, there are multiple plug-ins that seem like the answer, but still present the same problem; the user must initiate the translation process, and that translated page vanishes once the user leaves. What we need is a way to create permanent foreign language pages.

There’s 2 ways to do this:

1. Manually translate the pages and create a separate site (easy for static sites, not so easy for frequently updated sites or blogs)
2. Create a program that automatically does this for you

Unfortunately, I know of no program that performs such a function. I guess this means I get to do some programming.

More on this as I come up with something.