Hey, Can Anybody Read This?

Castellucio, Michael, Strategic Finance

As globalization and the Internet combine to shrink the space between the lines, both longitudinal and latitudinal, the sounds of other languages become more common in our neighborhood. And with the addition of new languages there's a new problem.

Until now, on the Internet at least, if you knew English, you could get by very well. Although only 8% of the world's population are native speakers of English, a majority of 56.5% of Internet users have English as their native language. But that's changing. New Internet users who don't speak English now outnumber new English users, and Dan DePalma, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, says that due to this growth, "U.S. businesses will have to learn to translate their Web sites and Internet services into other languages." (Global Internet statistics by language are available at www.euromktg.com/globstats.)

Commerce depends on communication, and anything that inhibits the exchange of information is a problem. So what do …

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Publication information: Article title: Hey, Can Anybody Read This?. Contributors: Castellucio, Michael - Author. Magazine title: Strategic Finance. Volume: 81. Issue: 1 Publication date: July 1999. Page number: 63+. © 1999 Institute of Management Accountants. COPYRIGHT 1999 Gale Group.

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