By Paul Rizo

Google is the biggest search engine in the United States and a good percentage of Europe as well. Being the top ranked result on Google is inexplicably beneficial for translators or multilingual writers for obvious reasons; exposure. Now the United States and Europe don’t have as big a population as Asia but they do have a lot of influence on media consummation on a global scale. So being top ranked on Google helps a lot for opportunities in getting clients as a writer or translator. Now, one may ask: why can’t you just be on any page of Google and have the same result? The answer is simple: academic research has indicated that 91% of people do not go past page one in a Google search and 50% don’t go past the first 3 results. As one can see, it is almost imperative to be the top result on Google. For translators and other language professionals being top ranked in Google is a double whammy because of their global presence.

Say someone is looking for a translator in a language that happens to be one of the pairs you’re apart of. If you’re the top search result for Italian to English in the United States, then most likely the same will apply to Italy or any other country where translation services are being searched for in your language pair. For the language pairs I work in, I can see many advantages. English is one of my native languages and a common second language that people acquire on a global scale. For example, the UN has most of their spoken dialogue and other oral presentations done in English. The same can be said about documentation of all types being translated into English. Spanish, my second native language, is increasingly becoming one of the most popular spoken languages in the world with large parts of the Caribbean, all of South America, Spain and many people in the United States being native speakers or choosing it as a second language. Italian and French have some use but they aren’t necessarily popular. Portuguese is very useful as it has a decent number of speakers across three continents and is one of the seven most commonly used languages in terms of mass translation for documentation. Lastly, one of my favorite languages and another popular one is Arabic. The Middle East is on the rise as a national power and is a huge hub for commerce and trade, so knowing Arabic will increasingly become a huge benefit for companies.