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Multilingual Search Engine Optimization

Language reflects the culture of a certain community. It has its own nuances that impede the flow of meaningful communication.

Language is also a barrier in the internet business as statistics says that 63 percent of internet users are non-English speakers. With this fact, non-English speakers tend to use search engines with their own regional language, setting aside Yahoo and Google, two of the most famous but English-using search engines in the planet.

To address the problem, Google is currently developing a translation program which aims to translate documents into any of the world’s main languages. Google wants to substitute this for human translators who used to create a database containing the nuances of a certain language. With this data, Google thinks, that computers are now ready to find patterns in these languages and hopefully could create a system for that so-called “engine translators”.

Franz Och, head of Google’s translation, admits that the process is not perfect, but he is hoping that this could be an improvement on previous machine translation concepts. Further, he said that there is no such thing as as “mostly correct translation” but acceptable translation. And this database may never be at a par with human translation.

Och said that the more you feed data in the system, the more comprehensible the translation will turn out. Arabic and English are on of the most frequently-used language in the web, while Aafrikans, is the least-used language thus Google’s engine translator engine.

Google is now slowly penetrating into the Asian markets. In China, Google is planning to buy up to two Chinese companies and invest in as many as five more over the next year, says IDG News Service reports.

Google wants to gain grounds on its Chinese rival Baidu, a search engine for online marketing officers was formed in 1999 by Mr Robin Li and has a market value in excess of $3 billion, according to the New York Times. It was foreseen that over the next year, Google will acquire one or two companies in China and invest in four to five companies.

Google is also trying to penetrate one of the most challenging markets in Asia-the North Korea where all information including songs and praises found in the Naenera website is a tribute to it’s leader Kim Jong-I.

Who knows a few years later, Google will also include Philippines in its list and further explore possibilities on using regional languages in the web. Yet, that would still be a vision as these engine translators are still on its way in developing a unifying system that would translate languages so as to further advance human communication.

Please view the Multilingual Search Engine Optimization services provided by ComCorp.