-- the Labyrinth Spring 1996 --
The Multilingual Internet
Alan Levine, DIST
Somewhere lost in my pile of web bookmarks is a quote from a demographics survey
estimating that by the turn of the century, the majority using the Internet will
be non-English speaking people. Although today's Internet was born under U.S.
Defense agencies, it is now a global network system. Remember also that the first
W stands for World Wide Web, a concept developed at a Swiss science institute.
The multilingual Internet is growing in two distinct areas; the development of
content in different languages, and the evolution of software tools that are
localized for specific languages. We will present examples of both in this
article, as well as pointing you along the path to find more sources of
information.
Language based on Latin alphabets (i.e. Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French,
German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish) are not difficult to integrate
into the Internet since the character sets are very similar and already "coded"
into the Internet protocols. Other languages such as Arabic, Czech, Greek,
Hebrew, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Chinese, and Turkish present problems. Not
only do they require vastly different text characters, but a few are read right
to left! Some of the programs mentioned below that support these non-Latin
languages make use of new standards for coding Internet transmitted content.
Internet With An Accent®
Accent Software
(URL: http://www. accentsoft.com/) offers, along with their line of translation software, a suite of four programs
for both viewing and publishing on the Internet. Internet With An Accent®
includes a World Wide Web browser, a WYSIWYG web page creation tool, an e-mail
editor, and a free viewer to read any document created with the suite's tools. It
allows you to read and write content on the Internet in over 30 languages. In
addition to the obvious ones, it includes Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech,
Finnish, and Romanian.
All of the language viewing options are accessible from a pull-down menu, so you
can swiftly change the display from say Portuguese to Hebrew characters. The
e-mail program allows you to write in different languages within the same message
and more than 50 special keyboard maps are available. Furthermore, the software
has a choice of 15 languages for its various menus and commands. Internet With An
Accent®, available for Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, will run on a 386 PC or higher
with at least 4 MB of RAM.
Video on Line
Based in Italy, Video On Line (VOL) is an Internet service provider
with large scale dreams. Unlike existing companies such as America On Line or
CompuServe, VOL is built upon a World Wide Web structure (I wondered a bit about
the "video" part of it's name -- perhaps World on Line?). They provide dial up
access to the Internet and have established a world wide base of "nodes"
connected by very high speed data lines that stretch between Europe and North
America plus more dedicated lines between Europe, Africa, and Asia. A massive
advertising campaign saw VOL aggressively seeking footholds in many developing
countries, ones where current access is limited, but ready to explode in growth.
But beyond just providing access to the Internet, VOL is offering language
specific content. "It is an international system, with a multi-lingual and
multi-local logic: a local service network at every level (from civic networks to
national services), connected by a single global system, in line with the nature
of the Internet." Although your first view of VOL (URL: http://www. vol.it/) is
in the home language of Italian, along both sides of the screen are options to
view the same content localized to almost 40 countries. Note that the content is
not defined by language per se but by region, so that rather than just a site in
English, there is content for the United States, England, and Canada (which has
services available in either French or English.)
VOL offers a free web browser they call "Tiber," which offers a user interface
(menus, buttons, and dialog boxes) in 18 languages. So if you are fluent in
Czech, you have the option to select Otevøít pamilové místo...from the Soubar menu when you are trying to Open a URL from the File menu. (It seems like an OK button is universal!)
Web Translator
Globalink (URL: http://www.globalink. com/) is known for their
line of PowerTranslator programs that work in conjunction with your word
processor to translate documents into other languages. They are extending this
capability to the Internet with a product called Web Translator that will work as
a NetScape 2.0 plug-in "to translate sites currently shown in Spanish, French,
and German into English, or vice versa, just by clicking a button. Web
Translator's multilingual translation capability allows users to access foreign
language Web sites and to produce draft translations in their preferred language
retaining all graphics and hotlinks."
WorldWide Language Institute
The WorldWide Language Institute (URL:http://wwli.com/) offers training and publishing services to create multilingual
Internet sites. Their site offers many resources grouped in the categories of
Language Resource Library plus a Translation Center with on-line dictionaries.
Unicode Home Page
This site (URL: http://www.stonehand. com/unicode.html),
maintained by Glenn Adams of Stonehand, Inc. contains information about the
computer character coding system that allows the Internet exchange of content in
different languages. This site is geared for those interested in the technology
that works behind the scenes of the multilingual Internet.
The Human Languages Page
This site (URL: http://www.willamette.
edu/~tjones/Language-Page.html) was one of the early entries on the web frontier.
Developed by Tyler Jones at Williamette University, it offers a vast array of
resources for information about languages grouped into the categories of
Languages and Literature, Multilingual Resources, Text & Book Archives, Schools
and Institutions, Linguistics Resources, or Commercial Resources. Jones has also
created a series of on-line Spanish lessons (URL:
http:..www.willamette.edu/~tjones/Spanish/Spanish-main.html) that include small
audio clips for help in pronunciation.
The Multilingual PC Directory
If you are looking for a foreign language software,
steer your bookmarks to this site (URL:
http://www.knowledge.co/uk/xxx/mpcdir/index.htm) or (URL: http://www.chorus.
cycor.ca/multipc/book.htm); a source guide to companies that produce such
software.
Finding More
These sites are but the tip of the Internet iceberg. If you have not
become familiar with using web search tools, you might want to take a guided walk
with MCLI's "webhound" (URL: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/webhound/). I
found information for this article using the massive Altavista site (URL:
http://altavista.digital.com/) by entering in the keyword field:
+multilingual +internet +software
where the "+" signs indicate words that should occur in all items. Altavista's
search engine quickly returned access to the more than 3000 documents it found on
the web that contained these key words.
The Labyrinth-Forum: Spring 1996
Maricopa Center for Learning and
Instruction (MCLI)
Maricopa County Community College District The Internet Connection at
MCLI is Alan Levine --}
Comments to alan.levine@domail.maricopa.edu
URL:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/labyforum/Spr96/spr96L5.html