The internet is becoming a more inclusive place as far as languages are concerned: Browsers with multilingual functionality are not a big deal at a time when domain names are being registered in many Indian languages. The minimum number of languages a website needs to have in order to be competitive is 16. So, why not search in your own language?

Users searching for information on Google can do exactly that now. Google’s multilingual search lets users look up information in 14 languages – Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Hindi, Icelandic, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swahili, and Welsh. When a user searches for a term, Google first looks up relevant web pages in the user’s language. Along with these results, it also produces translated, relevant results from pages that are in other languages. When the user clicks on such a result, the page it leads to is also translated using Google Translate, the company’s machine translation (MT) application. Thus, the search experience is encompassed in the user’s language.

This development furthers Google’s avowed mission of making information available to as many people as possible. It is also a huge boost to producing more content in many more languages and takes machine translation to a wider audience. It’s surprising that Google took long as it did to roll out this feature, considering the idea had taken root nearly two years ago and that it had the technology to do so. Others with fewer resources did so sooner – for example, Deep Web had envisioned and achieved multilingual search in 2009.

Linguistic quality issues may still persist with translated results, but our research has found that not all information has to be perfectly translated. Besides, there’s so much content out there – and is being added to by the second – that ’s crying to be translated, that machine translation has to be the feasible solution for achieving some sort of information democracy to make more content available in a wider range of languages .

What challenges does multilingual search pose for webmasters and global marketers? For one, their copy will need to be as local to the intended market as possible, so that the translated content holds more relevance. If they are not targeting particular geographies (and why aren’t they?), then it needs to be devoid of phrases and usages that will only make sense in a particular cultural context . Websites, especially monolingual ones, should seize the opportunity provided by Google’s MT engine to make themselves accessible to a wide-ranging audience. However, putting up more languages is still necessary to cater to major multilingual audiences.