The title of this post is a quote from Wittgenstein which kept popping into my head as I was traveling through Europe these past weeks. I visited France on a ski trip, stopped over in Vienna by airplane and then traveled to Budapest by car.
I speak Dutch, some English, a little German and unfortunately only know one word in Hungarian. The conference I’m visiting only had 4 English presentations: my own, Ernst-Jan’s and two more. Unfortunately none of the other presentations used the only Hungarian word I know.
Hungary has a population of about 10 million people. After WW1 the country got split up and Hungary lost 72% of its land (a sensitive subject even now) which means that there are about 14.5 million people who still speak the language.
In Europe we tend to compare ourselves to the US regularly. We are jealous of the great start-up cultures in cities like San Francisco and the entrepreneurial spirit that so many Americans seem to have. But how much difference is there really between these two parts of the world? Lets take a good look at some statistics.
Population
The US has a population of more than 300 million. Compare that to Hungary and you aren’t too well off. Compare it to Europe as a whole and the figures look different. There are more than 700 million Europeans. That is twice as big an audience as the US?! Suddenly I don’t feel so alone anymore.
Language Those 700 million people are divided by language, right? They all speak different languages so it is too difficult to reach them? Well yeah, there are 23 official langauges in the European Union and 65 languages and/or dialects in total. That sure sounds fragmented.
Everybody in the United States at least speaks English, right? Well, almost. English is not the official language of the United States but more than 82% of the population speaks it as their native language.
Lets look at Europe again: 51% of all europeans speak English as a second or first language. That actually means that there are more people who speak English in Europe (357 million) than there are people in the United States, in total!
Money
It isn’t really about the language is it? It must be about the money. The United States is a richer market. But is that really true?
It looks like the GDP of the US was about USD 14,330,000 in 2008 and USD 18,930,000 in Europe (In millions of dollars).Yep, Europe is doing a lot better than the US when it comes to GDP. Maybe GPD growth? Is the US growing faster than we are? I don’t know what the results will be of the current economic crisis but when you look at from 2006 till 2007 the United States GDP grew 4.9% and our GDP grew 16%.
Maybe you say I’m making these numbers up as a biased European? Nope, they are from the CIA World Fact Book. Surely the CIA can be trusted on their own numbers?
The more I think about it the more interesting Europe becomes to me:
- There are more people in Europe
- More people speak English in Europe than there are people in the US
- We have more money in Europe than in the US
- We are growing faster
I have to admit, all these ‘facts’ are based on statistics. And we all know how trustworthy those are. But I do suggest you do your own research and look at what you can find out about the differences between Europe and the United States before you pack your bags and move to San Francisco.
Now all that is left for me to do is convince all the Internet Entrepreneurs in Hungary, and Europe, to actually start speaking English…
YouTube is making some serious efforts to breach the language barriers we Europeans face on a daily basis. I’d love to watch some interesting Italian documentary on YouTube, yet my knowledge of the Italian language is limited to the words needed for ordering food or drinks. The Google-owned video giant now offers a solution.
If the person who has uploaded a video also added captions, YouTube adds real-time machine translation. From the YouTube blog:
To get a translation for your preferred language, move the mouse over the bottom-right arrow, and then over the small triangle next to the CC (or subtitle) icon, to see the captions menu. Click on the “Translate…” button and then you will be given a choice of many different languages.
The machine translation is far from perfect and you’ll have to make an effort to understand what the Italian man is saying. Yet it’s a good first step which might inspire YouTube users to translate more videos.
One of the problems with online language training sites is that the content is ridiculous, and the user interface usually is unintuitive and plain ugly. (Online) language programs come and go, but usually never really take off. The guys at Berlin based Babbel have made an interesting attempt to finally create an appealing way to learn languages. The program offers English Spanish, French, German and Italian.
The language training program offers some new learning approaches, think of interactive word-n-picture matching and describing images. All words have spoken audio to get an idea for pronunciation. The site tracks (signup) your progress, and reminds you what to review.
For my review, I subscribed for (advanced) Spanish. The site has a big amount of words to learn, displayed in categories like Birthdays, Furniture and Traveling. Looking at the wordlists, I have to say that the site would fit best for people that are beginning to learn a language. I guess the site can use its funding to cover a wider level of students. Also, the site is great for memorizing words, but it would be great if there was a way to learn the grammar.
The company was originally funded by the four founders but received VC funding from VC Fonds Berlin. When I asked about the funding details, Thomas replied: “The only thing I can say that each of our investor is bringing a six-digit Euro amount into the company.”
The site offers great and free language training, and the good news is that more features can be expected with the new funding! Also, they actually have name that you won’t forget that quick.
As you might have noticed now and then almost none of the Next Web editors are native English speakers. We do have a lot of native English readers who send us tips and correct our grammar and of course we use our spelling checkers and check each others posts. But interpreting words will always stay a challenge for us. As Antonio Porchia said in 1943 (translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin):
What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.
In Europe we have a problem with languages. Every country has its own language so offering a simple service for everybody there is a lot of work. People also underestimate the effort it takes to offer something in multiple languages. Google is now offering most of their services in 40 different languages. You might think that this is just a matter of translating every word on a website. But it is more difficult than that:
Take Hebrew or Arabic, which are written from right to left. An Arabic speaker may search for [world cup football 2008] [كأس العالم 2008 لكرة القدم]. Part of the query will be written from right to left in Arabic, while the numbers will be written left to right. Sometimes the right-to-left difference can mean having to change the entire layout of a page, as with Gmail.
Or take Russian, where words change depending on their placement and role in a sentence. In Russian, for example [pizza in Moscow] is [пицца в Москве] but [pizza near Moscow] is [пицца рядом с Москвой].
It is a very good idea to offer your service in more languages than one. Just remember that there is more to language than just words.
It’s a Sunday afternoon, so you’re either working on your own company or you’re bored. Here’s a site that will be useful for you anyhow: Project Cartoon. It revolves around the infamous “How Projects really work” cartoon, which offers a funny way to learn from the mistakes most start-ups make. So if you spend this Sunday on finetuning your start-up’s activities, you might want to scan the cartoon to see what you’re doing wrong.
So what does Project Cartoon offers for the bored blog-browsing visitor? Well, by using an Ajax-based editor, you can give the cartoon a twist. Change the order of the cartoons and use those hidden copywriter skills to make up new witty captions. Or translate the existing cartoon to your own language. Unless you’re German, Spanish, Finnish, Swedish, Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, French, Serbian, Dutch, Japanese, Hungarian, Turkish or Iranian. In that case, some early adopter compatriot already passed by.
Good luck with the first steps of your cartoon career. You’ll get an unique URL after you’re done, so you can help your friends to get through Sunday as well.
So I’m am the Next08 conference watching some start-ups that give a five minute elevator pitch. I can’t understand them all, as not all the German entrepreneurs here are as smart as Amazee, Jupidi, Mikestar and Toksta, since they present in German. I’m sure this is more comfortable for them as it’s their native language, and of course, most of the services are focused on the German market, but something doesn’t feel right here.
There have been many discussions about the advantages of building a start-up in Europe. The most mentioned advantage almost always is that we Europeans speak several languages, which makes us localization experts. Yet after a few months of traveling through Europe and visiting start-up communities in London, Geneva, Paris, Brussels, Gent, and now Hamburg, I’m starting to believe the language thing is our biggest weakness as well.
You know, most of these young aspiring entrepreneurs are obviously giving a good show here, since the German-speaking audience here is really excited, to say the least. But do they realize that there are some of the most influential web professionals walking around here, who don’t understand a word of what they’re saying? While hundreds of start-ups are dying for some attention from influentials like Steve Rubel and Stowe Boyd, these presenting entrepreneurs just ignore them by speaking another language.
So whether you’re from Germany, Holland, Italy or France, an international attitude really pays of at an international conference. Even if it’s just a mention on a blog, like Amazee, Jupidi, Mikestar and Toksta got. Viel glueck!
As the major social networks are working their way into Europe, interesting news about localization features keep popping up my feed reader and mail inbox. The two major headlines today: Facebook launches a German version and LinkedIn is partnering up with a big French job listing service.
The one million German speaking Facebook users now have access to an interface in their own language. I’m sure they appreciate that, since the German voice-over business has been a booming industry since the rise of television. With that in mind, it’s not surprising that 2000 German users voluntarily fixed the translating job in less than two weeks.
It’s only the third language version of Facebook. The choice for a German version is kind of weird if you consider the fact that Germany or other German speaking countries are not listed in the top 10 countries for Facebook users. After the United States, Britain is number two with 8 million active users and Canada is third with 7 million users. Turkey is fourth, followed by Australia, France and Sweden. So if you just consider the user numbers, Turkey would have been a more logical choice. Yet Germans have more money to spend, and in that light, a French version will probably be next.
In that country, LinkedIn did a pretty good job expanding their market reach. TechCrunch reports that they partnered up with Apec.fr, a job listing site that claims they have about 1.2 million unique monthly visitors, 600,000 registered users and 35,000 registered companies. Those users can now register for LinkedIn and start using the service without leaving the French interface of Apec. If I were working at European LinkedIn competitors Viadeo and Xing, I’d be scared.
The way LinkedIn and Facebook approach Europe – just offer language support – is pretty effective. One of Europe’s largest social networks Netlog can certainly confirm that. They hired two two Turkish students to translate the service for a 1000 dollars. It took the students a week, four months later the Turkish version had 2.5 million users.
Yet I prefer the MySpace approach. They are already based in France, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and soon in Russia and Turkey. When they launch, they install a local team who knows what’s hot and what’s not in the country and throw a great party. I’d thought I would never say this about a company owned by Murdoch but here we go: It feels like MySpace respects the cultural differences more and really wants to make an effort. I hope it will pay off.
Read this post by Patrick de Laive about possible Facebook acquisitions in Europe.
Last week we wrote about Netlog, a successful European Social Network that lets members translate its service into different languages. They are currently offering 8 different local versions of their service and is close to reaching 30 million members and 4 billion page views every month. They built a Turkish version in less than a week which grew to 2.5 million members in only four months.
It seems that Facebook came to the same solution recently when it was searching for a way to start offering localized versions of its service. Mashable reports that Facebook will launch a new app titled Facebook Translations (link wasn’t active when I published this!) that will help members translate Facebook into different languages. Facebook wants to make Facebook “available to everyone, everywhere, in all languages”.
They claim to have more than 800 translators working on several different languages right now. In recent years we have noticed that simply translating a service isn’t enough to claim a local market and users often prefer an existing local product over an imported and translated foreign one. Still, Facebook is not just a social network but a great platform with more benefits that just networking.
It is going to be an exciting year for European Social Networks as Facebook comes available in more languages.
Written on 3rd March 2009
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The title of this post is a quote from Wittgenstein which kept popping into my head as I was traveling through Europe these past weeks. I visited France on a ski trip, stopped over in Vienna by airplane and then traveled to Budapest by car.
Written on 2nd November 2008
Written on 29th July 2008
For my review, I subscribed for (advanced) Spanish. The site has a big amount of words to learn, displayed in categories like Birthdays, Furniture and Traveling. Looking at the wordlists, I have to say that the site would fit best for people that are beginning to learn a language. I guess the site can use its funding to cover a wider level of students. Also, the site is great for memorizing words, but it would be great if there was a way to learn the grammar. 
It’s a Sunday afternoon, so you’re either working on your own company or you’re bored. Here’s a site that will be useful for you anyhow: 
Last week we 
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
