The formerly monolingual photo-sharing site is now available in Spanish, French, German, Korean, Italian, Portuguese and traditional Chinese.

Until last Tuesday, the highly popular photo-sharing Web site Flickr was living in an English-only world. No longer: the company has launched new versions in Spanish, French, German, Korean, Italian, Portuguese and Chinese versions.

Stewart Butterfield, Flickr co-founder and general manager, expects the move to increase international membership — and it’s hard to see how he could be wrong there. Already, Flickr use is relatively high in Germany, Brazil, Spain and France, and the addition of the new languages has made the site all the more accessible to those markets. In fact, Flickr is now available in all of the Internet’s most widely-used languages, except Japanese. However, plans are underway with Yahoo Japan Corp. to launch a Japanese site in the near future.

Going global is increasingly necessary for all Web sites, and through the process of localization, your company can also reach out to a worldwide audience. Language Translation Inc. in San Diego is specialized in Web site and software localization, as well as translation and interpreting. “We speak your language — and theirs.”