Right now if you're a native English speaker, the
Web is your oyster. Most non-English sites feel at
least some compulsion to provide an English
translation somewhere in their pages, even if the
effort is less than satisfactory. The commom
perception is that the Internet is heavily slanted
towards English speakers and that English was making
rapid strides towards becoming a truly international
language. True enough, perhaps, but that isn't the
whole story. After English, the most common
languages on the Net are, in order, Japanese,
Spanish, and German, with French and Italian tied
for fifth. With Internet use about to mushroom in
China and Latin America, some observers predict that
within two or three years, more than half the Web's
content will be in languages other than English.
That locks us English-only speakers out of a lot of
Web content, and it poses a huge challenge for
businesses who count on the Web serving its global
interests. On the other hand, the Web can help in
preserving threatened minority languages, such as
the attempt to preserve the Welsh language by the
Linguasphere project. Multilingualism isn't going to
disappear, and those who want to be part of the
World Wide Web had better start preparing.
Berlitz language courses, anyone?
Lots of translation help is out
there, of course. AltaVista has the most widely
known auto-translate tool at babel.altavista.com/translate.dyn/,
and Go.com has another at translator.go.com/.
These sites work best at translating short snippets
instead of large bodies of text. Need a
professional? Visit the American Translators
Association at www.americantranslators.org/tsd_listings/
for info on a translator near you. Glenn's Guide to
Translation Agencies at www.etranslate.net/
gives more sources. Technical info on coding Web
sites, particularly on the Unicode standard (which
incorporates every character in every language into
one standard) can be found at the Babel site at
babel.alis.com/. More info on Unicode is at
www.unicode.com/. Microsoft has produced an
excellent white paper on "Designing a Global and
Localized Web Site," available at
www.microsoft.com/technet/Analpln/globloc2.asp.
FedEx, at www.fedex.com/, has excellent
resources about handling global deliveries under its
Global Trade Manager site.
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