Does the population of the Internet correspond to the amount of information in a particular language to the number of native speakers of that language? Or some nations, with their apparent small number, are more fruitful in creativity, communication and authorship of printed material?
The collection of such information is carried out by special robot programs. They uninterruptedly open sites, determine the language in a machine way and transfer the received data to other programs for generalization. The results make it possible to analyze the ratio of the number of native speakers to the amount of content in this language.
According to the Ethnologue website, the leaders in the use of the language as a mother tongue are:
Chinese – 1 billion 284 million
Spanish – 437 million
English – 372 million
Arabic – 295 million
Hindi – 260 million.
The Russian language occupies the eighth place in the list. It is spoken by 167 million people.
The ratio of users of Internet and chinese to english translation resources in the world looks somewhat different. The share of English and Chinese users is approximately the same and amounts to 26.8% and 24.2% respectively. Spanish-speaking users follow with 7.8% of the total. Russian speakers are in ninth place and make up 3%.
The fullness of the Internet with information from the point of view of the language looks completely different. Most of the content on the internet is in English. And this is natural. The Internet was born in America. Initially posted in English, information was picked up by other regions – English is spoken in more than a hundred countries around the world. The top five looks like this:
English – over 57% of content
Russian (ranks second since 2013) – 6.8%
Japanese – 5.6%
German – 5.6%
Spanish – 5.1%
Surprisingly, Chinese content only ranks ninth in the world. Its share today is approximately 2.1%.
The shortage of Chinese content is also a problem in China itself. According to various estimates, it accounts for only about half of the Chinese Internet. The second half is occupied by English. This is due to the fact that Chinese government structures have long treated the Internet with restraint, guided primarily by the requirements of national security.
Today, the popularity of the Internet in China is growing at an impressive pace. Interactive technologies are included in the official programs for the development of science and technology in the country. The state encourages any initiatives related to information technology.
Much attention is paid to translation issues, automated programs are being developed. The introduction of the Internet in the educational, medical and banking sphere is expanding. We welcome the development of distance learning, online services, e-commerce and other Chinese content.
