http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2006/nov/03/yehey/techtimes/20061103tech1.html
Friday, November 3, 2006
Too much English on Web
'risks crowding out other cultures'
Experts at a UN forum on Internet governance have warned that the
predominant use of English on the worldwide web needs to be checked before it
crowds out other languages.
They fear forms of cultural knowledge accumulated over centuries of human
progress could be be lost for ever.
"Some 90 percent of 6,000 languages (at use today) are not represented on
the Internet," Yoshinori Imai of NHK, Japan's Broadcasting Corporation, said
Wednesday.
"These people could be left out in the desert of no information and no
knowledge," he said.
In countries such as Colombia and Senegal, oral tradition and cultural
heritage that could be used for research and education purposes may never reach
the broader world, sociologists and linguists told the four-day forum, held in
the southern Athens suburb of Vouliagmeni until November 2.
"A large part of the population are voiceless because they cannot share
the information," said Adama Samassekou, president of the African Academy of
Languages in Mali.
"Every time a language dies, a vision of the world disappears," he said.
"Even in the research field there's a linguistic bias, English is far and
away the dominant language," added Divina Frau-Meigs, a professor of media
sociology at the University of Sorbonne in Paris.
When it comes to creating sites with non-English content, users in many
countries face difficulty in that HTML -- computer language through which web
pages are created -- largely uses English words and abbreviations, said Bernard
Benhamou, senior lecturer on the information society at the Political Sciences
Institute in Paris.
"For (Westerners) this does not mean much, but for a user who doesn't
speak English it's a hell of a task," he told AFP.
In one case in Cambodia, the local Internet community developed its own
software in Khmer after being turned down by a software developer, said Markus
Kummer, chairman of the United Nations working group on Internet governance.
For the time being, initiatives to diversify language use on the Internet
are undertaken by various countries at local level.
But the United Nations and other organisations such as ICANN, the
non-profit organisation that manages the Internet's technical root, are mindful
that fragmentation could occur if this issue is not adequately addressed.
If that were ever to happen, experts say that typing an Internet address
would produce different links depending on the user's geographical location,
while email would get hopelessly lost en route.
"The risk of fragmentation today is low, but if were to occur it would be
really bad," said Patrick Faelstroem, a senior consulting engineer at Cisco
Systems and a member of the Swedish government's IT policy and strategy group.
"It would mean that if you send me an email from Greece, I may not be
able to even reply to you from Sweden," he added.
-- AFP
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