One of the major problems with the internet, and a leading cause of the digital divide, is the fact that over half of the websites in the world are in English. While currently, the largest proportion of internet users (30%) are English speakers, the fastest growth in internet usage is in languages such as Chinese, French, Portuguese and Arabic. Assuming that the website language ratios stay the same, one solution is for everyone to learn English. Another is for websites to be freely translatable from one language to another. 

On the first point, 380 million people speak English as a first language, 600 million as a second and a further billion are learning. This covers about a third of the world’s population having access to at least half of the internet. The other two-thirds are obviously feeling left out. On the flip side, just under half of the internet is inaccessible to those who may speak English but do not speak the other top internet languages. (German, French, Japanese, Spanish) It seems far fetched to assume that the entire world will want to learn English and that all future websites are created in that language as well.

The second option is to make the web translatable. This is a very difficult undertaking but increasingly looks like a more likely option. Although far from perfect, Yahoo has had a search result translation service since 2005. Now Google has decided to jump on the bandwagon with their own translation service announced this week. The Google tool will allow search terms and results to be translated to and from 12 languages.  Google admits that machine translation, which does the work, has its flaws.  However, Google’s brilliant engineers and scientists coupled with the company’s financial resources are bound to make a significant and rapid improvement to the technology.  After all, you can’t organize the world’s information if you don’t understand half of it.