Linden Lab starts to localize the website - international marketing starting?

I dont think making an ingame full text translator would be that great deal, online word to word translation would yes be of use.

Many games started like that, doing international pages fot people from outside to download the software and try it out, and maybe in the future starting to host an International server elsewhere. That´s a rather cheap step to do, just rough translate the page and stuff but second servers for the outside-us would reduce probably lag for many international users. I wonder how many Linden helpers speak Finnish or Russian or even Chinese.

I noticed that so far they have localized parts of the site for German, Japanese, and Korean. Japanese and Korean are a little surprising, since as far I know SL doesn't even support the characters for those languages. But choosing those countries to start out with does make sense from an economic point of view - they are some of the places with the highest rates of internet users among the general population.
Which languages do you think will be next? I expect French, Chinese, and Spanish, Italian, and maybe Portuguese based on who's already in SL and the high-speed net access availability in those language groups.

Oddly about 3 months ago on Slashdot, the very same arguments were raised about Esperento.

I started to learn it about 1991 for a few months, and I remember a small amount.
Everyone in class was about 30 years older than I

Ultimately it's a good idea, but with many other good ( Better? ) ideas eg Free Tibet, Universal equal rights for woman, Linux on the desktop, a mature civilization on Earth, a halt to global warming.....( things I would like to see happen.)

It's probably always going to " too hard " , or " cant be bothered " or " someone elses problem " for the indifferent majority of people.

For better or worse, English is the world language, that is untill the Chinese become very rich, and then we will probably start to learn to speak in tones.

Just my .02c