At the last estimate it was thought that there are around five hundred and thirty seven million users who make use of the internet in the English language, on top of this around 445 million people use the web in the Chinese language. These are the two main languages that the public use in order to navigate the internet, but there are a huge number of people who use countless other languages to surf the net and these add up to around 995 million.
Many businesses miss out on a huge untapped global market by alienating customers who cannot speak the language in which the website has been written.
In a Eurobarometer survey, it was found that around 90% of all European web users will make the choice to use a website that has been written in their first language, as they feel it gives them a better feeling of security and confidence that the transaction will go well.
It is clear then that if a global business does not want to alienate a large consumer market then they must take the issue of language translation very seriously.
The new generation that is coming through which has been named the Millennial generation is bound to make a large impact on the global business world as many of these people use the internet every single day. The Millennial generation are also proving to be entrepreneurial and with many of them coming from emerging markets, it seems that they are making the most of the internet to start-up companies.
In order for them to reach as many people as possible with their websites (and as a result maximise revenue) they are using machine translation services. But using a machine translation service over a human does have its drawbacks, as whilst it might be cheap it is also sometimes in accurate. It is therefore up to companies to balance the importance of language translation with the cost of the service.

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