The Cervantes Institute, one of the largest Spanish-language cultural institutions, unveiled on January 14 its annual report on the overall status of the Spanish language in the world. The 2012 Report focuses particularly on the high demand for Spanish instruction that is being experienced in Asia. The report, entitled “Spanish in the World,” also points out the lack of Spanish-teaching professionals when it comes to meeting those requirements. In China, for example, universities have had to reject 70% of applications from students who wanted to learn Spanish due to the lack of teachers available to fill those positions. A total of 25,000 people were enrolled in Spanish courses in Chinese universities in 2012, but had there been enough teachers, the number would have exceeded 80,000 enrollments.
For this reason, the Institute aims to redirect its efforts toward the Asia-Pacific region, as it believes that Japan, and China in particular, represent a sort of El Dorado of the 21st century. The Spanish language will quite likely play a major role in these two countries as they have become the second (China) and third (Japan) leading world economies.
Furthermore, the presence of Spanish on the Internet is also growing. As the Cervantes Institute’s press release reflects, “today Spanish ranks third on Internet as the most popular language (it grew by 800% in the last decade), including social networks. On Twitter, it is already the second most-used language after English, and Facebook has over 80 million Spanish-speaking users.”
All these points merely reaffirm the upward trend of Spanish as a vehicle for global communication. Thus, every day there are more reasons to translate into Spanish.
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“Más noticias sobre la buena salud del español”
Tags: global communication, internet, Spanish
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