Found in Translation

particularly successful,” Jay explains.
Wikipedia currently boasts more than twenty million articles across all
languages. Most of its new content growth comes from the non-English
projects. Many of these languages have millions of speakers. Take India, for
example, which has more than a billion people, and 29 languages with more
than a million native speakers, according to India’s 2001 census. Another 60
languages have more than a hundred thousand speakers and 122 languages
more than ten thousand native speakers. However, in spite of the plethora of
other languages, Walsh observes that, “In India, the web tends to be English-
rich, and Indic languages are far less present. Considering the fact that there
are hundreds of millions of people there, a significant percentage of whom are
not English speakers, it’s safe to say that there is a serious lack of information
available in Indic languages.”
Indeed, the Tamil Wikipedia is the ninth most popular Tamil-language
website in terms of traffic, while the Bangla Wikipedia contains the largest
corpus of information in modern Bangla. As of October 2011, Wikipedia
recorded 43.5 million page views in Indian-language wikis. As the
communities continue to add new content, Wikipedia will continue to grow,
and more people will have access to information in their mother tongues.
The communities of people who volunteer their time and expertise to the
many Wikipedias of the world in hundreds of languages are building an
important base of knowledge, one that may actually help the erosion of some
less common languages. Translation plays a part in allowing that to happen. In
turn, Wikipedia is also frequently used as a resource by professional
translators.
Lang uag e s by the Numbe rs
This may surprise you: The ten languages with the most first-language speakers are (in order of
number of speakers) Chinese, Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi/Urdu, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian,
Japanese, and German.
6
Which languages have the most content on the Internet? In order: English

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(with more than 50 percent), Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Arabic, French,
Russian, and Korean.
7
In other words, to achieve a balance of in-language web content that is
proportional to the number of speakers, Chinese and Spanish will need to someday surpass English
online. Meanwhile, Bengali and Hindi/Urdu still have a long digital road ahead.