Language Preferences on Websites and in Google Searches for Human Health and Food Information

• Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
• Main Authors: Singh, Punam Mony, Wight, Carly A, Sercinoglu, Olcan, Wilson, David C, Boytsov, Artem, Raizada, Manish N
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: JMIR Publications 2007
• Subjects: Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics; R858-859.7; Public aspects of medicine; RA1-1270; Avian flu
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.9.2.e18; https://doaj.org/article/23042c3b4f3043f7b8f672936d22de3c

Background While it is known that the majority of pages on the World Wide Web are in English, little is known about the preferred language of users searching for health information online. Objectives (1) To help global and domestic publishers, for example health and food agencies, to determine the need for translation of online information from English into local languages. (2) To help these agencies determine which language(s) they should select when publishing information online in target nations and for target subpopulations within nations. Methods To estimate the percentage of Web publishers that translate their health and food websites, we measured the frequency at which domain names retrieved by Google overlap for language translations of the same health-related search term. To quantify language choice of searchers from different countries, Google provided estimates of the rate at which its search engine was queried in six languages relative to English for the terms “avian flu,” “tuberculosis,” “schizophrenia,” and “maize” (corn) from January 2004 to April 2006. The estimate was based on a 20% sample of all Google queries from 227 nations. Results We estimate that 80%-90% of health- and food-related institutions do not translate their websites into multiple languages, even when the information concerns pandemic disease such as avian influenza. Although Internet users are often well-educated, there was a strong preference for searching for health and food information in the local language, rather than English. For “avian flu,” we found that only 1% of searches in non-English-speaking nations were in English, whereas for “tuberculosis” or “schizophrenia,” about 4%-40% of searches in non-English countries employed English. A subset of searches for health information presumably originating from immigrants occurred in their native tongue, not the language of the adopted country. However, Spanish-language online searches for “avian flu,” “schizophrenia,” and “maize/corn” in the United States occurred at only ...