Alan Gerstle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I believe that the refusal of Americans to take second-language learning seriously is at least a part of the problem. While technophiles on all education levels are enthusiastic about learning new coding languages and new software, at least those in the United States find it anathema to study a second language long enough to become proficient in it. This creates not only a divide, but a certain presumption that others should learn English.
Don Osborn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: The recent news that the US government has in principle ceded control of ICANN http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/27/ntia_icann_meeting/ is related to an issue that seems to get less coverage - that of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) and the interest behind that in a more multilingual internet. Language of course is one of the factors of the "digital divide" and it has been particularly problematic in the case of diverse scripts (and, although it is often overlooked in discussing writing systems and ICT, even Latin scripts with extra letters and diacritics beyond ASCII & ANSI). The Guardian has an interesting article exploring this issue in the context of internet governance at http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1830481,00.html (excerpts below). I've tended to see IDN as a subset of the larger issues of content, but in a way, resloving the technical issues involved in multilingual domain names contributes not only to making the web more welcoming to more people and peoples, but also to facilitating the processing of more localized content in languages that are not yet well represented on the web. Sort of a wedge issue, in other words, for the multilingual internet. Hopefully the new developments with regard to ICANN will help in this process. Don Osborn Bisharat.net PanAfrican Localisation Project "Despite everything you may have heard, the global resource we all know as the internet is not global at all. Since you are reading this article in English you probably won't have noticed, but if your first language was Chinese, Arabic, Hindi or Tamil, you would know very different. At most websites you visit you will be scrabbling to find a link to a translated version in your language, seemingly hidden amid tracts of baffling text. Even getting to a website in the first place requires that you master the western alphabet - have you ever tried to type ".com" in Chinese letters? www.inthetext.com --------------------------------- Want to be your own boss? Learn how on Yahoo! Small Business. _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
