Online Gaming Websites that fail to localise are gambling with failure.

Online gaming is a huge and profitable Internet business which has been vastly changing due to many developments over the last year. The United States online gaming industry was shut down after George W. Bush signed the unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act on September 30th 2007, thereby criminalising the transfer and handling of payments from online gambling. As the US was the most profitable market for the majority of the leading gaming firms, they have been hit hard and one of the internets biggest businesses lost a large amount of their profits overnight. They now have to focus their

efforts on other countries and new territories due to the fear of losing more revenue. As a result, other markets are set to benefit financially from the gambling industry. Asia is just one example.

Countries within the Asian Continent such as China, Thailand, South Korea and Vietnam, are growing stronger and wealthier and recently the gambling laws have become less restrictive as, not only have Singapore agreed to end their 40 year ban, but many other countries are currently reviewing their gambling laws in an effort to attract the tourists dollar. Asia is a continent that proves to have a huge cultural fragmentation consisting of different languages, religions and ideologies which emphasises how online gaming firms can no longer hope to succeed against their competitors in countries such as Japan or Thailand without translated and localised websites.

This is the same for many European and South American countries. The recent events are simply identifying the great need for website localisation to ensure their customers can log on to a site that is available in their native language. Gavin Wheeldon, CEO of Applied Language Solutions, warns, “To succeed in an international market it is imperative that websites are translated and localised as, over 100 million people access the internet in a language other than English and it is proven that they stay twice as long if the website is in their own language.” Applied Language Solutions, have a high level of expertise and knowledge in the translation and localisation of websites and translate in over 150 languages including all the major European, Asian, African, Middle Eastern and American languages.

Gavin Wheeldon said, “We have over 14,000 professional in-country translators and interpreters and due to the number of gaming sites we work with, many of those translators have an in-depth knowledge of the gaming industry and terminology. This allows them to consistently give an accurate translation no matter what the language.” Applied Language Solutions translate all kinds of documents from simple letters to large technical documents, including whole websites and printed catalogues, for specialist Medical, Legal, Financial and Marketing organisations.