From mbrennen@fni.com Tue Jun 5 01:41:03 2001 From: mbrennen@fni.com (Michael Brennen) Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 19:41:03 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [E-Commerce] Edupage, June 4, 2001 (fwd) Message-ID: ENGLISH STILL RULES ON WEB, BUT TIMES ARE CHANGING As Internet use grows worldwide, global companies will have to start offering their Web sites in multilingual formats to reach non-English speaking consumers as well as non-English speaking business partners. In fact, 66 percent of e-commerce dollars will be generated outside the U.S. over the next two years, and non-English speaking users will be the majority on the Internet by 2005, according to the research firm Aberdeen Group. Yahoo! has expanded its reach to broadcast in languages native to Latin America, China, Europe, and India. Computer Economics analyst Michael Erbschloe argued that global companies "have no choice but to approach it from a multiple language point of view" and believes global business supply chains will have to operate on a multilingual Net soon. The Aberdeen Group says 57 of U.S. Fortune 100 companies ran multilingual sites during 2000, nearly twice as many as in the previous year. (NewsFactor Network, 31 May 2001)