Did You Know There Are 7,106 Ways to Communicate?

Did you know there are 196 countries around the world? That means there are a lot of languages spoken. As a global company, CommScope needs to communicate its message to many different people. Ricardo Diaz explains how CommScope is doing so with its several foreign language websites.

I ’m sure you’re wondering where I got the number to that question. To find the answer, let’s take a step back and look at the world we live in. It is incredibly diverse and there are lots of big numbers to support that question. At this time, the planet Earth is home to:

  • 196 countries
  • More than 5,000 ethnic groups
  • Approximately 4,200 religions
  • 7,106 languages

English_speaking_mapWith those numbers in mind, it seems that anyone wanting to become a polyglot (master of multiple languages) would be quite difficult, right? As a global company, CommScope is present in more than 150 countries and many of our people can be considered polyglots. This is good for our customers and partners. At the end of the day, a little more than five percent of the world speaks English as their native tongue (green map) and just six percent speak it as a second language. We should not forget that Mandarin Chinese and Spanish exceed those figures.

What about the other ways CommScope interacts with our ecosystem? Currently, our website is available in English, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Russian. That’s not a small feat taking into account that one year ago, our website was only in English; however, our website is more than a collection of web pages, it is a gateway to our data vault.

CommScope stores more than 2,300 documents and other assets on its website. Understandably, we cannot provide all of them in multiple languages—not without a big effort (translation, review, publication and updates). One of our latest tools, the Fiber Performance Calculator, can be configured to display all the labels in English, Spanish, French and German. More languages will come because the tool has been designed to support any language.Map_2_blog

Four languages may not seem to be enough compared to the 7,106 that exist today, but a quick look at a map (blue) shows the difference between the territories where an English-only asset can be understood and a multilingual one. Do you think we should keep on pursuing the multilingual approach?

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