And when you examine the native languages spoken by the world’s 4+ billion Internet users, it becomes evident that you must support many languages in order to reach many people.
In fact, if you want to reach more than 90% of the world’s Internet users, prepare to support more than 40 languages. Which is why it is no surprise that the organizations and companies that support a significant number of languages also tend to boast a significant number of customers, members and visitors.
Facebook supports more than a hundred languages and boasts nearly two billion users. Google supports more than a hundred languages via its search engine which continues to be the dominant search engine around the world (Russia and China excepted). And Wikipedia (which emerged number one in the 2019 Report Card) supports more than 280 languages and averages more than 17 billion page views per month.
But, for the rest of us, adding languages isn’t all that easy — as it can be quite expensive. While I would argue that the investment (for most organizations) pays off over the long run, a common question I get asked is how many languages should we support?
This is a difficult question to answer without first understanding your business, budget, customers and goals.
But I can first point to the latest data from the 2019 Web Globalization Report Card and say that, for the world’s leading brands, 32 language is the “average” number of languages they support.
The nice thing about studying the same websites for so many years is that I can tell not only how many languages companies such as Apple, Microsoft, BMW and Philips have supported since 2002, but exactly which languages they have supported. And though the pace of language growth may have slowed over the past two years, the overall trend is clear — companies continue to add languages as they seek to expand their global reach. Starbucks, for example, supported just three languages in 2003; today it supports 27 languages (and added a new localized website just last year).
Looking ahead, I fully expect this average to double yet again. Only a handful of companies have localized for India and this country alone has more than 20 official languages. Hindi, for example, is supported by just 7% of the websites in the Report Card.
As I noted in my introduction to the Report Card this year, with all the talk of trade wars and tariffs and walls, one might think that companies have been pulling back globally. But this is simply not the case.
On eve of Brexit, figures show unprecedented numbers of Britons are turning to translations of continental novels
Not remaining on shelves …
As Brexit looms and the UK faces a future outside the EU, the country’s readers are gulping down European fiction at an unprecedented rate, with sales at their highest since records began.
According to research commissioned by the Man Booker International (MBI) prize from Nielsen Book, overall sales of translated fiction in the UK were up last year by 5.5%, with more than 2.6m books sold, worth £20.7m – the highest level since Nielsen began to track sales in 2001. Over the last 18 years, sales of fiction in translation have risen “steadily”, with the performance of translated literary fiction in particular standing out for its “extreme growth”, up 20% in 2018 year-on-year. Sales of English-language literary fiction over the period, meanwhile, have plateaued and are now significantly below where they stood in the mid-noughties.
Quick guide
Top 10 bestselling novels in translation in 2018
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Nielsen said that UK readers are “overwhelmingly” reading translated fiction from Europe, with French literature accounting for 17% of volume sales, the biggest language represented. Strong sellers over the last year include Lullaby, Leïla Slimani’s story of a murderous nanny, which racked up sales of almost 100,000 copies.
“Reading fiction is one of the best ways we have of putting ourselves in other people’s shoes. The rise in sales of translated fiction shows how hungry British readers are for terrific writing from other countries,” said Fiammetta Rocco, administrator of the Man Booker International (MBI) prize, which will announce its longlist on 13 March.
Norwegian and Swedish writing, represented by authors including the Norwegian thriller powerhouse Jo Nesbø and the Swedish bestseller Jonas Jonasson’s The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, was also popular over the last year, with Chinese, Arabic, Icelandic and Polish languages “in growing demand”. Popular Polish titles included Olga Tokarczuk’s MBI-winning Flights, as well as Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy series The Witcher. Chinese science fiction and fantasy novels such as Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem and Jin Yong’s A Hero Born also sold strongly, but sales of crime novels and thrillers, a major contributor to sales of translated fiction in the past, declined by 19% between 2017 and 2018.
Charlotte Collins, co-chair of the Translators Association and translator of Robert Seethaler’s MBI-shortlisted novel A Whole Life, hailed the surge of interest, adding that the amount of international fiction now available for sale in the UK has almost doubled in recent years, now accounting for 5.63% of all published fiction.
As 2020 begins…
… we’re asking readers, like you, to make a new year contribution in support of the Guardian’s open, independent journalism. This has been a turbulent decade across the world – protest, populism, mass migration and the escalating climate crisis. The Guardian has been in every corner of the globe, reporting with tenacity, rigour and authority on the most critical events of our lifetimes. At a time when factual information is both scarcer and more essential than ever, we believe that each of us deserves access to accurate reporting with integrity at its heart.
More people than ever before are reading and supporting our journalism, in more than 180 countries around the world. And this is only possible because we made a different choice: to keep our reporting open for all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay.
We have upheld our editorial independence in the face of the disintegration of traditional media – with social platforms giving rise to misinformation, the seemingly unstoppable rise of big tech and independent voices being squashed by commercial ownership. The Guardian’s independence means we can set our own agenda and voice our own opinions. Our journalism is free from commercial and political bias – never influenced by billionaire owners or shareholders. This makes us different. It means we can challenge the powerful without fear and give a voice to those less heard.
None of this would have been attainable without our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.
As we enter a new decade, we need your support so we can keep delivering quality journalism that’s open and independent. And that is here for the long term. Every reader contribution, however big or small, is so valuable.
Have you ever worried in your student years or later in life that time may be starting to run out to achieve your goals? If so, would it be easier conveying this feeling to others if there was a word meaning just that? In German, there is. That feeling of panic associated with one’s opportunities appearing to run out is called Torschlusspanik.
German has a rich collection of such terms, made up of often two, three or more words connected to form a superword or compound word. Compound words are particularly powerful because they are (much) more than the sum of their parts. Torschlusspanik, for instance, is literally made of “gate”-“closing”-“panic”.
If you get to the train station a little late and see your train’s doors still open, you may have experienced a concrete form of Torschlusspanik, prompted by the characteristic beeps as the train doors are about to close. But this compound word of German is associated with more than the literal meaning. It evokes something more abstract, referring to the feeling that life is progressively shutting the door of opportunities as time goes by.
English too has many compound words. Some combine rather concrete words like “seahorse”, “butterfly”, or “turtleneck”. Others are more abstract, such as “backwards” or “whatsoever”. And of course in English too, compounds are superwords, as in German or French, since their meaning is often distinct from the meaning of its parts. A seahorse is not a horse, a butterfly is not a fly, turtles don’t wear turtlenecks, etc.
One remarkable feature of compound words is that they don’t translate well at all from one language to another, at least when it comes to translating their constituent parts literally. Who would have thought that a “carry-sheets” is a wallet – porte-feuille –, or that a “support-throat” is a bra – soutien-gorge – in French?
This begs the question of what happens when words don’t readily translate from one language to another. For instance, what happens when a native speaker of German tries to convey in English that they just had a spurt of Torschlusspanik? Naturally, they will resort to paraphrasing, that is, they will make up a narrative with examples to make their interlocutor understand what they are trying to say.
But then, this begs another, bigger question: Do people who have words that simply do not translate in another language have access to different concepts? Take the case of hiraeth for instance, a beautiful word of Welsh famous for being essentially untranslatable. Hiraeth is meant to convey the feeling associated with the bittersweet memory of missing something or someone, while being grateful of their existence.
Hiraeth is not nostalgia, it is not anguish, or frustration, or melancholy, or regret. And no, it is not homesickness, as Google translate may lead you to believe, since hiraeth also conveys the feeling one experiences when they ask someone to marry them and they are turned down, hardly a case of homesickness.
Different words, different minds?
The existence of a word in Welsh to convey this particular feeling poses a fundamental question on language–thought relationships. Asked in ancient Greece by philosophers such as Herodotus (450 BC), this question has resurfaced in the middle of the last century, under the impetus of Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf, and has become known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis.
Linguistic relativity is the idea that language, which most people agree originates in and expresses human thought, can feedback to thinking, influencing thought in return. So, could different words or different grammatical constructs “shape” thinking differently in speakers of different languages? Being quite intuitive, this idea has enjoyed quite of bit of success in popular culture, lately appearing in a rather provocative form in the science fiction movie Arrival.
Although the idea is intuitive for some, exaggerated claims have been made about the extent of vocabulary diversity in some languages. Exaggerations have enticed illustrious linguists to write satirical essays such as “the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax”, where Geoff Pullum denounces the fantasy about the number of words used by Eskimos to refer to snow. However, whatever the actual number of words for snow in Eskimo, Pullum’s pamphlet fails to address an important question: what do we actually know about Eskimos’ perception of snow?
No matter how vitriolic critics of the linguistic relativity hypothesis may be, experimental research seeking scientific evidence for the existence of differences between speakers of different languages has started accumulating at a steady pace. For instance, Panos Athanasopoulos at Lancaster University, has made striking observations that having particular words to distinguish colour categories goes hand-in-hand with appreciating colour contrasts. So, he points out, native speakers of Greek, who have distinct basic colour terms for light and dark blue (ghalazio and ble respectively) tend to consider corresponding shades of blue as more dissimilar than native speaker of English, who use the same basic term “blue” to describe them.
But scholars including Steven Pinker at Harvard are unimpressed, arguing that such effects are trivial and uninteresting, because individuals engaged in experiments are likely to use language in their head when making judgements about colours – so their behaviour is superficially influenced by language, while everyone sees the world in the same way.
To progress in this debate, I believe we need to get closer to the human brain, by measuring perception more directly, preferably within the small fraction of time preceding mental access to language. This is now possible, thanks to neuroscientific methods and – incredibly – early results lean in favour of Sapir and Whorf’s intuition.
So, yes, like it or not, it may well be that having different words means having differently structured minds. But then, given that every mind on earth is unique and distinct, this is not really a game changer.
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