In Demand Online Language Translation
Translation Requests For January 2003

If you landed here directly out of the search engines, you can go to my In Demand Online Language Translations start pagefor a full explanation of this list.

The tools and techniques remain the same as to how I optain this information, but I have made some significant changes. For one, I have included much more information this time. Also, I have added some commentaries below the list to help you understand what this new info might mean. All in all, I feel that this list is much more complete now.

This list is based on 2,146,653 translation oriented searches, with 232 different translation keywords during the month of January, 2003.

In Demand Online Languages, January 2003

Languages	# Keywords	% of Searches
General Requests*	36	38.8 %
Spanish	20	17.4 %
Free Requests**	23	9.1 %
French	17	8.5 %
Latin	12	4.2 %
German	11	3.7 %
Italian	10	2.6 %
Japanese	11	2.5 %
Chinese	11	2.1 %
Russian	11	1.8 %
Web Site***	10	1.8 %
Dutch	7	1.2 %
Greek	6	0.92 %
Portuguese	6	0.91 %
Swedish	6	0.77 %
Arabic	6	0.74 %
Polish	6	0.66 %
Hebrew	5	0.57 %
Korean	3	0.36 %
Turkish	4	0.29 %
Danish	3	0.28 %
Norwegian	3	0.21 %
Vietnamese	3	0.18 %
Finnish	1	0.12 %
Thai	1	0.12 %
Total	232

*The vast majority of people do their translation oriented searches with general translation keywords, such as translation, translate, translators, etc., without specifying a language.

**As you can see from this figure, there are a lot of people that want a "free" translation. There were 23 keywords that had "free" as a part, such as "free spanish translators".

***This section represents specific web site or web page translation requests.

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Commentaries: I have been watching translation oriented keywords and their cycles of popularity within the search engines for a while now. There are certain things that I have noticed. Spanish is still immensely popular as a request even though the online Spanish community isn't spending nearly as much as many other "less popular" languages. Spanish online spending is ranked 8th world wide in this moment.

My guess is that many sites in the U.S. are making their web pages available to the strong online Spanish community that is within the U.S. and Mexico. My question is, will this surge of language interest that Spanish is enjoying right now shift over to some of the European and Asiatic country / languages in the near future once the Spanish frenzy tapers out? After all, the real international spending is coming from these countries - see my e-commerce growth projections page.

Another interesting observation is how a language grows and shrinks with popularity based on world events. I have noticed that requests for Arab translators has made a significant climb in the last 3 months, perhaps it is coincidence, but I imagine that there is a correlation with current world events.

I plan on writing some articles that take into consideration many other realities that are not so obvious just looking at these statistics. I will probably post these articles in my upcoming newsletters, they have to do with how translation oriented visitors and searchers are behaving based on what I am seeing on this site.

SiteBuildIt! is the tool that I use to gather this info, to take a look at the users Action Guide manual, look for "free-trial". They allow you to download this manual for free if you like.