When Facebook decided it had to get more popular among the Spanish speakers, it initiated a community-driven translation of its webpages. The exercise turned out to be an amazing success. Soon after the website’s popularity spread like wildfire and today, Facebook is among the top three social networks in Spain. This exercise has now been carried out by Facebook in dozens of several languages with reasonable success.
Creating vernacular versions of leading English portals seems to be mantra to gain market share in the non-English speaking countries. A lot of websites have tried it in India too. Facebook had tried its vernacularization strategy in India too. Even where no competition existed, Google had launched several of its products in Indian languages – increasing the user engagement, probably.
But, does this vernacularization actually work in India? Youtube announced the launch of a Hindi version of its portal a few days back. This shall enable the video uploaders to write about the video in Hindi using the transliteration services. While technologically, I commend Google for taking efforts into reaching the deeper markets, I cannot help asking if this shall truly add value to the intended audience.
Internet in India is driven majorly by the urban usage. An overwhelming majority of those can read and write in English. It is not because the Internet is not prevalent to a greater extent. But it is mainly because these interior regions still have to rely on low bandwidth services, which is definitely not the place where you would want to watch a YouTube video from.
It is probably the very same problem with lower bandwidths that has made most of this section of Indian population consume services, but not give back. An example of this would be Wikipedia. While the English section of Wikipedia has over 3 million articles; with reasonable contribution from Indian contributors as well, the Indian language sections of Wikipedia only have between 10000 to 50000 articles.
That being said, I should reiterate that this is not necessarily bad strategy. Companies like Google have done the right thing by making the content relevant to all kinds of people. However, how much of this can be consumed is dependent on the Government policies that can help expedite the reach of these services to the common man.
Few of us have to fuel the growth of Indian languages on the internet. The most common whine you hear is “There isn’t enough out there for language users”. So what Google is doing is correct – adding language support to as many applications as they can.
On the content side we at Oneindia.in are doing the best we can and we have seen good results
regards
BG Mahesh
http://www.oneindia.in
I guess you are right, this strategy probably doesn’t have a big impact on indian audience , probably 2-3 years down the line as internet penetration increases in the Tier II and III cities and with a wider web audience the need for having sites in your native language will matter more.
Choosing one language from amoung 15 amounts to favouritism by an outside, multinational company.
The reason people in India and many African countries prefer English is because there is no question of favouritism towards any given ethnic group.
I agree that there should be a one-click way to get to Hindi (or other Indian languages) shown for IPs coming from India.