Recently in Languages Category

To further support hi5's numerous Spanish-language users around the globe, we're pleased to announce our new hi5 Help section in Spanish. All members who are using one of the three Spanish language options we currently have available can now access hi5 Help en Español by clicking on "Ayuda" in the page footer. There, you'll find FAQ articles and the ability to submit inquiries to hi5 Customer Support, as well as receive email responses -- all in Spanish.

This new offering is among many ways we support our Spanish-language customers. After initially translating our service into the most common form of Spanish a couple years ago (making it our first non-English language option), we began offering email-based customer support in Spanish in 2007. Last month, we rolled out two new Spanish language options: Argentina Spanish and Castilian Spanish (with more local/regional dialects of the language planned for the future). With the hi5 Help section now also in Spanish, we're delivering a complete service-to-support Spanish experience for our users who are most comfortable communicating and interacting in this language -- which is the primary tongue of 21 nations around the world and one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Russian has recently been added as hi5's 15th language option, and is being used by a quickly growing community of users in the Russian Federation, its emigrants and individuals in countries of the former Soviet Union.

A recent article in eMarketer pointed out that Russia is expected to become the #2 Internet market in Europe — second only to Germany — over the next five years. "Russia, Poland and the other Eastern European countries are the growth drivers for Internet adoption in Europe," wrote eMarketer senior analyst, Ben Macklin.

Russia is actually the world's most commonly spoken Slavic language, a language family that includes Polish, Ukranian, Belarusian, Czech, Serbian, Slovenian, Bosnian, and many others. It is a synthetic language with six cases, posing a non-trivial internationalizationchallenge for us.

To the nearly 300 million who count Russian as a primary or secondary language, hi5 extends its welcome!

hi5 приглашает всех, кто говорит по-русски!

As we rolled out simplified and traditional Chinese, you may have noticed that we added a new globe icon in the hi5 language navigation (see upper right hand corner of the hi5 homepage). We offer hi5 in so many languages now, they don’t all fit on one line anymore! So, we’ve added the globe icon to support an ever-expanding menu of language options.

Looking ahead…

Over the next six months, we’ll be adding new languages every month, and have other exciting features to make hi5 locally and culturally relevant coming as well. To take an active role in the fun, please visit, join and participate in our Language Forum.

 

In time for Chinese New Year (新年快乐!), we’ve added simplified and traditional Chinese as hi5’s newest translations. Over 1.2 billion people use these two written languages – making them so common, they were a perfect fit for our growing Asian offering.

“Chinese” is actually a collection of many diverse dialects including Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Min, Xiang, Hakka, and others. While Mandarin (the official language of China) is most often written in the simplified Chinese script, we provide the traditional Chinese script as well — to make hi5 readily available for as many Chinese-language Internet users as possible.

China has actually surpassed the United States in Internet usage, with over 150 million users spending nearly two billion hours online each week and a steady growth rate of 18% annually (see related Forbes article). With the addition of the Chinese scripts, we look forward to welcoming many new hi5 members in China, as well as those in other locations where the language is regularly used, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia, and more.

欢迎全世界的华人！