It’s estimated that the United States’ booming Hispanic population will near 90 million by 2050, quadruple its 22.5 million level in 1990. To many companies, that means that it’s time to update the corporate Web site with information written in Spanish.

“We’ve seen a shift in the past couple of years,” said Nannette Rodriguez, principal of viva! communications, 8435 University Blvd., Clive. “Companies are noticing the census data on Hispanics and realizing that it’s an underserved part of the public – particularly in Iowa.”

In response, Farm Bureau Financial Services recently hired viva to start re-creating the company’s Web site in Spanish. “At first, we’ll completely mirror the FBFS.com site visually, but with reduced written content,” said Rodriguez, who grew up speaking Spanish and English in San Juan, Puerto Rico. “The key information will be there initially, and eventually 100 percent of the English Web site will be reproduced.”

Farm Bureau, which does business in the South and Southwest as well as the Midwest, “wanted to take an aggressive stance” to reach Hispanic customers, Rodriguez said.

Each item is translated by one person, checked by a second person for the correctness of financial terms and further vetted by a third and sometimes even a fourth person for grammar and spelling.

Other Central Iowa companies have already taken the bilingual route. On the Allied Insurance home page, the user clicks on an “espanol” button to see everything in Spanish, including the monthly feature stories.

“We’ve grown in markets with strong Hispanic populations,” said Allied communications director Mike Palmer. “We were getting feedback from our agents that they needed materials for their Spanish-speaking customers.”

Principal Financial Group Inc.’s Web site offers several items in Spanish, including PDFs of the company’s annual reports, and EFCO Corp. has a complete array of pages at www.efcoforms.com/SpanVer.

Or you can visit iowastatefair.org/Spanish and read all about the fair in Spanish, including the rules for Busqueda de Talento Bill Riley, more commonly referred to around here as the Bill Riley Talent Search. (Rule number 5: El limite de miembros en un grupo es de cinco personas.)

At Regency Homes Inc., the plan calls for adding Spanish and one more language, too. With its focus on Central Iowa, Regency is responding to the sizable number of immigrants who have come to Greater Des Moines from Bosnia and is working to put Web site information in their native language.

“Our information services department is on special assignment,” said Dean Summa. “A Bosnian who’s employed here is our technical program guy, working on that. Another employee is making recommendations on Spanish.

“We would like have had it done a couple of months ago. As soon as we can get it complete, we’ll get it running.”