4 ms·

your statement implies an assumption that there is a normal distribution of users among the languages but google being a company driven by metrics would realize

by lingben 13y ago

your statement implies an assumption that there is a normal distribution of users among the languages but google being a company driven by metrics would realize that the vast majority of their users speak only a handful of languages, wouldn't they? I would venture to say that more than 60-70% would be English, followed by the romance languages and perhaps German ending up with more than 90% of users among 5-6 languages. there is no reason to make 90% of your users suffer for a possible inconvenience created by 10% of your users.

efdee 13y ago
I think you are leaving out a number of Asian and cyrillic languages that would heavily skew your numbers...
matho 13y ago
You might want to reconsider Google's target market. Only a minority of the world use the Latin alphabet.
potatolicious 13y ago
I would venture that your numbers are pretty off. As of the last quarterly results, 55% of Google's income is coming outside of the US[1]. China has more than double the number of internet users than the US[2], and this is increasing rapidly. We also know that Google has a mind to capture the burgeoning Chinese market, so the relevance of this number to them is pretty substantial. India and Japan combined also equals the US's internet user count. If you look at the top-10 in that list, it accounts for about 1.4 billion internet users. Of those, about 309 million come from English-speaking countries. 462 million if you're including all western European languages (romance languages). We know that, by sheer economic force, wealthy developed countries occupy the lion's share of Google revenues (the USA represents ~10% of all internet users, but 45% of Google's revenues). In terms of raw users impacted though, that's quite different. Google has no lack of users from non-English countries. But forget all of this for a second and assume that your numbers are in the ballpark. 60-70% English, moving up to 90% if you include western European "romance" languages (Latin and Germanic languages aren't the same thing, but whatever). Having just finished translating a large app into French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German, I'll say that "romance" languages aren't any easier to translate. French for example tends to run long, and provides huge headaches in any UI that's even remotely space constrained. German tends to mess up line breaks with long compound words, and there are a puzzling number of common verbs in Portuguese and Spanish that run much longer than you would expect them to. All of that requires babysitting and constant iteration to ensure everything fits, reads write, and works right. And you can see this with Google - they haven't gone all pictographic in their UIs. Instead they've most heavily iconified parts of their UI that are space-constrained. Toolbars are the canonical example. These are the components that most common make people tear their hair out and run screaming into the woods when translating. [1] http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...

by lingben 13y ago

efdee 13y ago

I think you are leaving out a number of Asian and cyrillic languages that would heavily skew your numbers...

matho 13y ago

You might want to reconsider Google's target market. Only a minority of the world use the Latin alphabet.

potatolicious 13y ago

I would venture that your numbers are pretty off. As of the last quarterly results, 55% of Google's income is coming outside of the US[1]. China has more than double the number of internet users than the US[2], and this is increasing rapidly. We also know that Google has a mind to capture the burgeoning Chinese market, so the relevance of this number to them is pretty substantial. India and Japan combined also equals the US's internet user count. If you look at the top-10 in that list, it accounts for about 1.4 billion internet users. Of those, about 309 million come from English-speaking countries. 462 million if you're including all western European languages (romance languages). We know that, by sheer economic force, wealthy developed countries occupy the lion's share of Google revenues (the USA represents ~10% of all internet users, but 45% of Google's revenues). In terms of raw users impacted though, that's quite different. Google has no lack of users from non-English countries. But forget all of this for a second and assume that your numbers are in the ballpark. 60-70% English, moving up to 90% if you include western European "romance" languages (Latin and Germanic languages aren't the same thing, but whatever). Having just finished translating a large app into French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German, I'll say that "romance" languages aren't any easier to translate. French for example tends to run long, and provides huge headaches in any UI that's even remotely space constrained. German tends to mess up line breaks with long compound words, and there are a puzzling number of common verbs in Portuguese and Spanish that run much longer than you would expect them to. All of that requires babysitting and constant iteration to ensure everything fits, reads write, and works right. And you can see this with Google - they haven't gone all pictographic in their UIs. Instead they've most heavily iconified parts of their UI that are space-constrained. Toolbars are the canonical example. These are the components that most common make people tear their hair out and run screaming into the woods when translating. [1] http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...