At
present, Americans represent the majority of web
publishers and web surfers. This is
expected to change in the future, as more Europeans, Asians and others get online.
For
the builder of commercial websites, it is vital to think globally. Always
remember that your visitors might not be proficient with the English language.
They also might not share your culture or values. What can you offer them? How
can you differentiate your site from those of your competitors?
There
are a many web tools available to translate web pages from one language to
another. Although the translations
are not elegant, they do provide a good "first cut" translation that
can be cleaned up by someone who is proficient with the language.
If you publish a few key web pages in foreign languages, they will be
indexed by search engines using the foreign language terms. This will bring you
additional traffic.
One
alternative to creating foreign language pages is to provide links to software
that translate pages dynamically from one language to another.