Google Tries to Translate in India

Internet giants such as Amazon.com and SoftBank are investing in India to cash in on the country’s spiking Web use. In less than two years, 100 million people have moved online, bringing the country’s total to 302 million in 2014, according to the Internet & Mobile Association of India. That makes India second only to China in its number of Internet users. U.S. corporate chiefs, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, have visited India in the past year to explore opportunities. But an enormous slice of India’s population can’t make use of anything those companies have to offer online.

G. Venkatesh, a 42-year-old office worker in Chennai, is one of hundreds of millions of Indians the Internet largely ignores. He’s a native speaker of Tamil, a language common in India’s southern states, and doesn’t understand much English. He says he can check his e-mail online and can sometimes use the Internet to look up addresses and phone numbers, and that’s about it. Even Indian websites that focus on his main reading interests—yoga, movies, sports—are of little use to him, because they’re mostly written in English. “So I depend on books,” he says, or Tamil newspapers for box scores and movie reviews. “I have not read about them on the Internet.”