I18n coming to Google apps August 1, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, web2.0 , trackbackAny global organisation needs to cater for a multitude of languages, and the percentage of English speakers on the intenet will continue to decrease as the technology spreads faster to the rest of the world. So you can have a business which restricts itself to the english speaking world and still have a vast potential customer base, but to be the world leader in any general market it needs to be fully multilingual, internationalised, “i18n” as some write it. (because the word ‘internationalisation” has 18 letters). And it’s not just human language, but also currencies, character encoding, dates, time zones, local spelling, postcode formats, weights and measures - the list goes on.
According to Google:
- Fact 1: 65% of Internet users around the world speak a language other than English.
- Fact 2: The Internet’s top 10 languages still only account for around 85% of users — and the remaining 15% represents almost 200 million people.
So they have set about making the paid-for google apps service i18l and have just announced six more languages:
Official Google Blog: Google Apps goes global
Here’s the full list: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Turkish, Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic, Hebrew, Indonesian, Hungarian, UK English and US English.
On another aspect, automated language cognition is always going to be a case of diminishing returns but it would be nice to see some extrension and improvement to Google Translate.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
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