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Posted on 12/16/2004 3:34:09 AM PST by Happy2BMe
The Internet is home to a wealth of multilingual content, but are its doors still locked by an English key?
At the end of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's hourlong address at the company's recent Government Leaders Summit, a representative from the Internet Society of China made the following remark in the ensuing Q&A session.
"Mr. Ballmer, now we still have to type in 'weather.com.cn' to check the weather. Most Chinese people can't do that. They just want to type in 'tian qi' (Chinese for weather)," he said. Short of a more concrete answer, Ballmer acknowledged that Microsoft needs to work better with the various domain name authorities to resolve this problem.
The observation by the Chinese delegate is not a revelation, but it again brings to the fore the long-debated issue of internationalized domain names (IDN) implementation. Simply put, it questions the ability of the Internet to handle non-Roman characters, such as words in Chinese or Hindi.
The Internet as we know it today is built on a Roman alphanumeric script, technically referred to as ASCII (American Standard Code of Information Interchange) characters. This means that only ASCII characters can be keyed in to the browser's address bar, and these are in turn converted into numerical IP addresses denoting the millions of destinations on the World Wide Web.
This approach works fine in the English-savvy world. However, for non-English speakers, they could be faced with the unenviable task of rote-learning numerical IP addresses, which is highly improbable, or the English spellings of dozens of Web sites they want to access.
In other words, while multilingual content has swelled in cyberspace in the past decade, the method of Web-address input still revolves mainly around the English language, a sticking point which has yet to be resolved until recently, despite the marked progress of the Internet.
This leads IDN proponents to ask the question: Is it easier to teach English to the growing number of non-English speaking Internet population around the world, or do we tweak the current Domain Name System (DNS) to accommodate the language nuances of these users?
The long road to multilingualism
Unbeknownst to Ballmer and the China delegate, an effort to bring IDNs from concept to reality has been under way since the mid-1990s, but the journey has been staggeringly slow.
Tan Tin Wee, a professor with the National University of Singapore who spearheaded the launch of Pacific Internet, an ISP, designed one of the world's first multilingual domain name systems in 1996.
Five years later, Internet governing body ICANN
(Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) formed an IDN Committee to examine the technicalities of multilingual domain name adoption. Despite initial patent squabbles, a set of standards was finally published in March 2003.
Instead of tweaking the current DNS and risking destabilizing the existing Internet infrastructure, ICANN's guidelines--formulated by its technical arm, the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF--dictate how vernacular characters can be converted to Unicode, an encoding system that supports around 40 languages including Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Russian. The Unicode characters are in turn encoded in ASCII for Internet transmission, leaving the foundation of the Net unchanged.
Years after its initial conceptualization, IDNs can now be registered with domain name registries like VeriSign
and I-dns.net. VeriSign offers a hybrid "multilingual.com" approach in which top-level domains like .com and .net will continue to be in English, but second-level domains are available in local languages like Chinese.
I-dns.net is promoting a format that allows the entire address string to be in native characters, a method that appears to meet the need for multilingualism more fully.
Both registries pledge compliance with IETF standards and have claimed early successes with their new IDN offerings, with strong uptake in Asian markets like China, Japan and South Korea. The two companies also require users to install plug-ins before they can key in native characters in the address bar.
The online population is expected to reach 1 billion next year; speeding up the implementation of IDNs could help fuel the next chapter of the Internet's growth and open up immense opportunities for areas like e-government and e-commerce. Research already indicates slowing Internet user growth in developed countries, but in contrast, the pool is set to expand in developing countries for at least 10 years to come.
Major tech behemoths like Microsoft are ramping up language-localization efforts in an attempt to grow their customer bases beyond developed nations. This year, Microsoft launched a low-cost flavor of Windows XP called Starter Edition for five developing countries, and its efforts to get more users online could be further helped by incorporating an IDN-compatible plug-in in its Internet Explorer browser. In tandem with Microsoft's push, chip giants Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are considering low-cost computer blueprints for developing nations.
While foreign IT vendors are going local, top-level support for implementation and education on IDNs, however, seems lacking, as efforts have been sporadic to date. At a time when things are moving at Internet speed, isn't seven years too long a wait for IDNs to come to fruition?
The silver lining in all this is that the government in China has reportedly put its full weight behind Chinese domain names. With the mainland's economic and political clout, it will be of little surprise that authorities and companies in other parts of the world could soon join in to make the global Internet more multilingual and, specifically, more China-friendly.
Its sad that most don't understand that we are headed to second rate status at breakneck speed. Time to start teaching the kids Chinese.
Wonder what the Mexicans are going to do when we sneak across their boarder looking for work?
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What computer hardware company is that one?
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The Internet started in the USA as a Department of Defense project, in collaboration with various universities and colleges, called the Arpanet. The military side was called the Defense Data Network (DDN) and Milnet. I worked on those two in the early to mid 80's (at the Pentagon). Because memory and disk space was very expensive (per bit/byte), we used ASCII, developed to translate any character into a single byte. Chinese, Kana, Arabic, etc characters would have taken many more bytes each, and for Chinese, there are about 3,000 separate characters. Therefore, there was no bias to project English/Western languages, just the NEED to conserve memory (else the whole thing wouldn't work!).
If the Chinese want a world-wide network than they are free to make one. Good luck finding all the money and companies that are going to support such an endeavor!
I guess they'll have to buy the rights from its inventor, Algore.
The pace that the Chinese economy is exploding and the number of users just in China alone going online over the next five years will justify a specific Chinese-based internet on it's own.
It will happen. Count on it.
"Conquer is the key word, I wonder if this relates also an urge to control content."
I wonder if their government would really allow the citizens to have access to the internet --- especially since they're liable to learn English and want to communicate with westerners.
Would that be on par with a 'Tenimin Square Internet Cafe' incident?
In the early 90's it was common to see Malaysian students on the talkers and MUDDS --- and they were eager to talk to Americans and British --- they seemed to have no trouble with typing in English and seemed very curious about how things were in this country. Then one day they started saying goodbye --- the said their government was discontinuing their access.
This really, really, really ticks off the french. And anything that ticks off the french MUST be the right thing to do.
America's role as superpower is not just military. Our culture will vanquish the inferior, non-freedom loving cultures out there. As bad and twisted as it may be, the American cultue is still the best one around
Well, gosh darn, I have to go to Walmart to buy their stupid products. But, I DO make the effort.
What's wrong with that picture?
Of course. Control means "complete control".
I think Al Gore has their key in a lockbox.
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