Microsoft has built its Windows Live bundle of online consumer services in seven Indian languages. Facebook has enlisted hundreds of volunteers to translate its social networking site into Hindi and other regional languages, and Wikipedia now has more entries in Indian local languages than in Korean.
Google’s search service has lagged behind the local competition in China, and that has made providing locally flavoured services a priority for the company in India. Google’s initiatives in India are aimed at opening the country’s historically slow-growing personal computer market, and at developing expertise that Google will be able to apply to building services for emerging markets worldwide.
“India is a microcosm of the world,” said Prasad Bhaarat Ram, Google India’s head of research and development. “Having 22 languages creates a new level of complexity in which you can’t take the same approach that you would if you had one predominant language and applied it 22 times.”
Global businesses are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year working their way down a list of languages into which to translate their websites, said Donald A. DePalma, the chief research officer of Common Sense Advisory, a consulting business in Lowell, Massachusetts, that specializes in localizing websites. India—with relatively undeveloped e-commerce and online advertising markets—is actually lower on the list than Russia, Brazil and South Korea, DePalma said.
Ram of Google acknowledged that the company's local-language initiatives in India did not yet generate significant revenue. But the investments, DePalma said, are smart. “They’re potentially creating the Indian advertising market,” he said.
English simply will not suffice for connecting with India’s growing online market, a lesson already learned by Western television producers and consumer products makers, said Rama Bijapurkar, a marketing consultant and author of Winning in the Indian Market: Understanding the Transformation of Consumer India. “If you want to reach a billion people, or even half a billion people, and you want to bond with them, then you have no choice but to do multiple languages,” she said.
Even among the largely English-speaking base of around 50 million Web users in India today, nearly three-quarters prefer to read in a local language, according to a survey by JuxtConsult, an Indian market research company. Many cannot find the content they are seeking. “There is a huge shortage of local language content,” said Sanjay Tiwari, the chief executive of JuxtConsult.
A Microsoft Corp. initiative, Project Bhasha, coordinates the efforts of Indian academics, local businesses and solo software developers to expand computing in regional languages. The project's website, which counts thousands of registered members, refers to language as “one of the main contributors to the digital divide” in India.