Multilingual Health Care

by

HIP Health Plan of New York today announced that it has added a fourth language, Korean, to its Web site: www.hipusa.com.

hip_korea.gif

Now the press release isn’t entirely honest. It says that Korean is the “fourth” language is in addition to English, Spanish and Chinese. Counting English as an “additional” language is a bit disingenuous.

Nevertheless, we applaud HIP for pushing forward with Web localization. At Byte Level, we’ve noticed a clear trend toward US-based companies localizing their Web sites to better serve Americans. Web globalization, as we have said all along, doesn’t have to be about entering new markets; sometimes it’s about protecting the market you already have.

The press release also claims that HIP was the first US health plan to add a language other than English to its Web site; it added Spanish two years ago (to our knowledge this claim is correct).

(Visited 38 times, 1 visits today)
John Yunker

John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.
Tweet
Share