6 presidential candidates pursue Spanish-speaking voters on the Web

If candidates with the best websites received the most votes, Barack Obama would be the winner among Spanish-speaking voters in upcoming U.S. elections.

Obama is one of at least six major candidates — five Democrats and one Republican — with an official Spanish-languages presence on the Web so far this election cycle. Many of the candidates' efforts at providing Spanish-language materials seems perfunctory, but not so for Obama. The Spanish-language section of Obama's site is as complete as the English-language sites of some of the lesser candidates. The only drawback for Spanish-speaking users is that the videos are all in English, although they're subtitled.

The site with the best-produced Spanish-language video is that of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has a bilingual page with links to videos in Spanish. One of them, titled "Con Hillary una vida mejor," is available in English and Spanish versions and says that the 2008 elections could be decided by the country's 10 million Latino voters.

Also effectively using video is Mitt Romney, whose main Spanish-language page highlights a brief video by his son Craig Romney, who speaks fine Spanish. In the video clip, the younger Romney, who served on a church mission in Chile, invites listeners to come to know his father and praises his record.

Although candidate Romney is the only Republican who devotes a part of his official site to Spanish speakers, Republican Ron Paul has an unofficial site run by some of his Florida supporters independently of the official campaign. It features news clips of Paul subtitled in Spanish.

The only candidate to have a separate official site with its own URL for Spanish speakers is Bill Richardson, who is fully bilingual. His effortless Spanish shows in a home-page video clip in which Richardson is shown in an interview.

Although he's a fluent speaker of Spanish, which he learned as Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic, Chris Dodd's site has only one Spanish-language page, with biography and platform. But Dodd is also shown in two video clips. Although he speaks with a moderate accent, he is easily understandable and is obviously adept at handling an interview in his second language.

Rounding out the list of candidates making an effort to reach Spanish speakers is John Edwards, who has a page featuring his platform.

One of the more bizarre uses of Spanish on a presidential website can be found on Fred Thompson's site, which has some of its menus and scattered headings throughout the site in Spanish. But you won't see them unless you have your browser set for Spanish as the preferred language.

The Spanish that shows up appears to be from a computerized translation in much need of improvement: One of the labels that says "About Fred" in English says "Fred Sobre" in Spanish — something that would make as much to a Spanish speaker as "Fred About" would to English speakers. And the Newsroom tab is labeled "Redacción," which as a stand-alone label would probably be understood as "Editing" rather than as the place to look for press releases.

Various headings and dates on some schedules on the site also show up in Spanish, probably something attributable to a default setting of some software rather than something intentional.