Lexicon Marketing, developer and marketer of Inglés sin Barreras, a video-based English learning program, has increased its advertising investment from $12.56 to $75.00 million in little over a year, and is now challenging the venerable Procter & Gamble for the top [advertiser in the Hispanic market] position.

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Total monies spent by the top-50 advertisers to reach the U.S. Hispanic market have grown more impressively than the overall market itself despite slowing in growth in recent years. From 2000-2004, dollars spent by the top-50 advertisers grew from $658.37 million to $1.23 billion, an 87 percent increase. The dramatic increase in advertising expenses serves as an indirect indicator of advertising investment satisfaction by existing advertisers.

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The Internet Advertising Bureau’s Hispanic Committee, comprising executives from companies such as Univision and Yahoo!, estimates that U.S. online advertising to Hispanics will reach $75 million this year, up 67 percent from 2003. Advertisers spent just $10 million in 2002, the bureau estimates.

Committee Chairman Peter Blacker, vice-president of multicultural and international advertising for AOL Media Networks, sees strong growth in 2005 as well. “I think the market is trending to well above $100 million for next year,” he says. “We’re seeing in our space right now sort of the go-go years of the ’90s.”

A strong selling point is the number of Hispanics who are going online at home. According to the 2004 AOL/RoperASW U.S. Hispanic Cyberstudy, 20 percent of U.S. Hispanic Internet users have been online at home for less than six months, compared with just 6 percent of general at-home Internet users. A separate report by Synovate predicts that by 2010, 62 percent of U.S. Hispanics will have access to the Internet at home – up from 45 percent this year.

Besides being a fast-growing Internet market, Hispanics also are spending slightly more time online than the general market. A 2003 study by the UCLA Center for Communication Policy determined that Hispanics spend 11.6 hours per week online, compared with 11.0 hours among non-Hispanics. The difference is greater at home, where Hispanics spend 9.8 hours per week online while non-Hispanics spend just 8.1 hours on the Internet, the study found.

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MTV Tuesday announced plans to add three new multicultural TV channels aimed at “super-serving” specific ethnic populations in the U.S.

MTV said its research shows ethnic populations in the U.S. are currently: “underserved by the media and there is a great appetite for local language channels amongst these groups. Many of these ethnic groups prefer speaking their home language, and are hungry for music and culture from their country of origin.” Additional ethnic channels are expected to follow.

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Double-digit gains in Hispanic advertising expenditures were made in all media, but television continues to garner the majority of all ad dollars. Television ad spending accounted for more than 64 percent of all expenditures in 2004. Nearly all media examined are predicted to exhibit double digit growth through at least 2007.

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Funding cuts and changes in education policies have led to a sharp reduction in the number of Americans studying foreign languages at the same time the government and business are demanding more employees with language skills.

[The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages] quoted the American Council on Education as saying overall foreign language enrollment in U.S. higher education fell from16 percent of students 1960 to 8 percent in 2002.

“Fewer than 1 percent of American graduate students are studying languages deemed by the federal government to be critical to national security,” said Keith Cothrun, a German teacher and ACTFL president, at a briefing at the National Press Club.

A 2002 survey by Health Companies International, a research firm, showed that Americans business executives had the lowest average number of languages spoken – 1.4. In the Netherlands, that number was 3.9, followed by Sweden at 3.4 and Brazil at 2.9. Just above the United States at the bottom of the list of 18 countries were three other English-speaking countries: the United Kingdom (1.5), New Zealand (1.6) and Canada (1.8).

The U.S. government needs 34,000 employees with foreign language skills in 80 agencies, according to ACTFL. A 2002 Government Accountability Office study found that the Army had serious shortfalls of translators and interpreters in five of six critical languages – Arabic, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Persian-Farsi and Russian.

Web sites for the Transportation Security Administration, Homeland Security Department and a government-wide job site list vacancies in those categories that pay from $80,000 to $90,000 per year.

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For the first time in history, Muslims are building large and growing minorities across the secular Western world–nowhere more visibly than in Western Europe, where their numbers have more than doubled in the past two decades. The impact is unfolding from Amsterdam to Paris to Madrid, as Muslims struggle — with words, votes and sometimes violence–to stake out their place in adopted societies.

Disproportionately young, poor and unemployed, they seek greater recognition and an Islam that fits their lives. Just as Egypt, Pakistan and Iran are witnessing the debate over the shape of Islam today, Europe is emerging as the battleground of tomorrow.

By midcentury, at least one in five Europeans will be Muslim. That change is unlike other waves of immigration because it poses a more essential challenge: defining a modern Judeo-Christian-Islamic civilization. The West must decide how its laws and values will shape and be shaped by Islam.

For Europe, as well as the United States, the question is not which civilization, Western or Islamic, will prevail, but which of Islam’s many strands will dominate. Will it be compatible with Western values or will it reject them?

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Paciano Pedro, a new immigrant from Mexico, has a severe language problem. Not only does he not speak English – he can barely speak Spanish.

The South Bronx man is fluent only in Otomi, an ancient, indigenous language spoken in remote mountainous villages in the southern Mexican state of Veracruz.

Pedro’s face may blend into New York’s fastest-growing Latino population, but he is part of a new wave of Mexicans who speak only Mixtec, Nahuatl or Otomi.

Mexican Consulate officials estimate that 40,000 non-Spanish-speaking Mexicans have moved to the city in recent years to work at car washes, corner markets and restaurant kitchens.

The majority of them are fluent in Mixtec, said Gaspar Orozco, the Mexican consul for community affairs.

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The last two days have seen the release of not just one but two online software translation portals. Yesterday Translate.org.za announced their system Pootle and on the same day Ubuntu Linux announced its Rosetta. Both allow registered users to translate PO files for a range of open source software.

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Emmy Award Winning TM Systems, developers of the industry’s only “end to end” language translation, dubbing and subtitling system, has added MTV Networks Latin America, headquartered in Miami Beach, Florida, to its growing list of international language localization users.

The TM Systems technology will offer MTV Networks Latin America the ability to subtitle all of its broadcast material, to and from any language, with the efficiency of a digital, fully integrated system that brings a greater flexibility, increased continuity, expedited completion time and greater overall accuracy.

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The issue of Western misperception of Arabs and Muslims was the subject of a singularly realistic debate this week at the headquarters of the Arab League.

Meeting under the title, “Euro-Arab Dialogue: The image of Arab-Islamic Culture in European History Books”, representatives of the Arab League, UNESCO, the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organisation (ALECSO), the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (IESCO) and the Council of Europe debated the misrepresentations of Arabs and Muslims in European countries. The international conference concluded that European culture contained an “erroneous image, if not images”, not just of Arabs and Muslims, but also of Arab culture, Muslim civilisation, and above all, of Islam as a faith.

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equinux has released iTranslate, a new translation tool for Mac OS X. The freeware application is a German-English and German-French translation tool.

iTranslate accesses information from the online dictionary LEO, provided by the Technical University of Munich. The program also allows you to look up words in the Wikipedia online encyclopedia. The application is a small window that fits easily on the desktop, precluding any need to click back and forth.

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Spending power of the nation’s largest ethnic group is growing at thrice the general population’s.

Marketing geared toward Hispanics has reached $3 billion so far in 2004, up 11 percent from last year.

That number is expected to rise to $3.6 billion by 2007, according to Hispanic Business Inc., which released “U.S. Hispanic Media Markets Report, 2000-2007” earlier this week.

“The Hispanic market is growing faster than the (general) market,” said Juan Solana, chief economist of HispanTelligence, the research division of Hispanic Business Inc.

Solana said that the spending power of the general population of the U.S. has risen 2.8 percent annually over the past decade, while Hispanic spending power has risen 7.5 percent.

In 2004, Solana said that the spending power of Hispanics in the U.S. is $700 billion and that it’s expected to reach $1 trillion by 2010.

The 2000 census is a major contributor in the surge of Hispanic marketing. Advertisers realized they had “a largely underserved” market of 35 million, Solana said.

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The U.S. Hispanic population has since risen to 39 million, according to census estimates.

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English remains the language of choice among the children and grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants, a new analysis of census data shows.

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Central America is critically important to the prosperity of the Western Hemisphere. The next step is to push Congress in 2005 to ratify the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

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