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Ironically enough, if we stuck to just quantitative criteria –a constant increase in the number of Spanish speaking internauts– the situation would be very different from that presented by the Cervantes Institute’s Annual Report. While, on the one hand, the bilingual English-Spanish population probably reached a ceiling over the last year, the numbers of those who only speak Spanish or are bilingual continued to grow. As new spaces have opened up on the Net in areas like health, education, senior citizens, art or local information systems, the need for more content in Spanish to be made available one would imagine would logically increase as well. But, this has not happened, or, at least, not at the same rate as the growth in population. This, by the way, does not mean that the Annual Report’s figures tell the whole truth since they only refer to web pages. The use of e-mail has risen notably over the last few years and this is made apparent by the proliferation of Spanish list serves. Nevertheless, lack of content still points an accusatory finger at our difficulty with converting language into an information industry.
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