Monday, February 19, 2007

Race for 2008 Presidency: Spanish Language, does anyone Care?

This is the start of my series of posts on the US Presidential Run for 2008 . For starters I stumbled on the web site on each of the current front runners ( yes, I did my own triage on that aspect). Hillary Clinton , Obama, John McCain and Rudolph W. Giuliani . Yes every one of these web sites must be backed and implemented by some savvy web designers and information architects but the one thing that seemed missing at the first glance was the lack of support for Spanish language. By ignoring the second most common language are these candidates doing the right thing? According to the 2000 United States Census, Spanish is spoken most frequently at home by about 28.1 million people aged 5 or over. Of these, 14.3 million reported that they also spoke English "very well". United States is home to more than 40 million Hispanics; the fifth largest Spanish-speaking community in the world, after Mexico, Colombia, Spain and Argentina. Yes, the experts would say that the Internet users of this Spanish community would not be challenged by English version of these sites but as the presidential candidate they need to make a more personal connection with their base and having a Spanish based language sites would be a good start in my humble opinion. What do you think?

PS. I am not a Spanish so it is not a personal agenda of mine.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I was expecting the websites to be completely in spanish, with a small link somewhere saying - "Please click here for English"

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