Different eHabits for Different Folks

From the perspective of our own lives, it is hard to imagine that people in different countries use the Internet in different ways. Markets develop and mature at different rates and Internet marketing habits vary from place to place.

Consumers in different markets have different habits when interacting online. Businesses that are looking to reach clients in other countries are advised to understand the opportunities and challenges that arise from these differences.

One example of this is the Financial Products industry in Spain. Only 14% of Spanish adult web users researched financial products online and of these only 3% bought online. One of the categories is car insurance where only 14% of consumers buy online.

This data, provided by Forrester Research, suggests that Spanish eBusiness executives have ample room to promote the Internet and support their clients with better site design, interactive help and follow-up of clients that abandon their sites before completing the process.

The Web by Language

Do you ever wonder what role language barriers play in this disparity. This is an important question when one suspects that a significant majority of the web's content is in English. Does this mean that most of the Internet users are English speakers?
Not necessarily. The Chinese represent an estimated 10-20% of all web users, the largest single group based on estimates by Hang Lei, the founder of Chinese translation community Yeeyan. See Ethan Zuckerman's blog.

But Chinese language content is not proportionally represented in the Internet. We haven't found an authoratative source that has established the percentage of content by language on the Internet, but Wikipedia suggests that 80% of the content is in English, followed by German and Japanese.

One experiment described by Mr. Zuckerman leads us to believe that these numbers might be accurate. A simple Google search for the phrase "breast cancer" in English yields almost 39 million pages. The same search in Chinese yields only 6 million pages. But the quality of the content is much higher in the English searches.
The same search in Spanish only yields 1.2 million pages. This is only 3% of the amount of content in English.

If this is true, we can conclude that is a "massive imbalance" in the amount of content available per language.

Translation Services in Hospital Settings

Imagine being admitted into a hospital in a foreign country where the hospital staff does not speak your language. This happens to thousands of people all over the world; many of them are critically ill or injured.

On one hand patients need to understand their medical condition and feel reassured and comforted. On the other hand proper medical care requires good communication between medical staff and the patient. To facilitate this process many large hospitals have translators and interpreters on call to play the critical role of communicators. Institutions can afford interpreters on staff when they have a constant flow of patients that speak specific languages.

But if the patient speaks a language that is seldom handled in the hospital or the institution is too small to afford staff linguists, there is a cost efficient solution: telephone interpretation services which usually can provide an interpreter in a couple of minutes into/from commonly spoken languages.

Medical translators cover a wide range of needs in patient's care. Competent medical linguists many times have had long careers in the healthcare industry, their knowledge of medical terminology must be extensive -in at least two languages- and they must have good communication skills to build a bridge between patients and their caregivers.

Hospital stays can be difficult times for many patients and their families, and they often have questions or concerns regarding their medical options. Medical interpreters provide confidential services that can help the patient feel heard by his attending physicians and reassured.