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Diversity issues are all about inclusion
for people
of all languages, all cultures and all abilities
November 11,
2007
By Janna Quitney Anderson, Director of Imagining
the Internet and Assistant Professor of Communications,
Elon University
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - You can find almost
anything on the Internet but when you find it chances
are it's written or spoken in English. According to
most estimates, more than half and perhaps as much as
80 percent of Internet content is in English.
According to
recent statistics, nearly 70 percent of the world's
Internet domains are hosted in the United States, about
11 times more than the second-place nation –
Germany. One reason for this is the lack of
internationalized domain names, but there are changes
in the works to make them available soon.
Since only about a
third of the world's 1.1 billion Internet users
speak English as their first language, two-thirds of
the people using the Internet have to have some
understanding of a non-native language if they want to
read the rich content available online.
Many see this
relative monoculture of the Internet as a tremendous
advantage. For example, people from all over the world
can take free online courses at MIT. With English
serving as a sort of default cyber-language we can
avoid the complexities and inefficiencies that have
prevailed in pre-Internet communications.
But others say it
is time for the Internet to become more diverse, and
things are starting to change as the Internet expands
beyond its Western origins to reach people across the
world.
That is why the
issue of Internet "diversity" is high on the
agenda here at the second annual Internet Governance
Forum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A globe-spanning group
of people from many different ethnicities, religions,
economies and cultures has gathered here to talk about
ways to broaden the spectrum of people who go online
and encourage the development of more content that
represents diverse languages, ages, abilities and
perspectives.
In short, they
want the Internet to look more like the world.
Today, Internet
engineers are working to overcome the biases that favor
English and western cultures. They are adapting the
Internet’s main traffic directories that keep
track of the computer host names used in Web and e-mail
addresses. Up to now, these addresses have only been
able to use the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet used
in English.
But the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, known as
ICANN, is now testing internationalized domain names
that allow Internet users to make subpages of the
'net in their own languages. The test includes
Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean,
Persian, Russian, Tamil and Yiddish.
"There is
today a test under way with 11 scripts that are not
using Latin characters in order to evaluate the effect
of those kinds of top-level domains on the various
applications, the browsers, the e-mail applications,
and the like, that might encounter such domain
names," said former ICANN chairman Vint Cerf.
"The intention is to reach the point where ICANN
can invite proposals for top-level domains in these new
character sets somewhere around the middle of 2008. And
this objective is for both the country code TLDs
(top-level domains) and also for the generic
ones."
These are
important steps toward building a truly multi-lingual
Internet.
As more
non-English-speaking people begin to use the Internet,
these efforts are gaining momentum, especially because
of the necessity for governments, companies and
organizations to reach out to people in their native
languages.
At the IGF
main-room session on Diversity, Ben Petrazzini of the
International Development Research Center spoke about
efforts to use new technologies to encourage positive
development. He said it is important to develop more
local languages in fonts.
"We have
invested $2 million in a project that is hosted at the
national University of Lahore in Pakistan to develop
and adapt 11 languages in the region," he said.
"It has developed localized versions of the open
source operating system Linux. It has developed optical
character recognition and text-to-speech software and a
wide range of supporting applications and utilities
such as lexicons and fonts in eight languages. This is
an example of the kind of things we should start
investing in if we aim to narrow the digital divide. In
Africa we are in the early stages of a project that
will develop localized terms, software and keyboard
development for 24 African languages. We are developing
digital local content."
The numbers tell
the story of a rapid change in the languages of the
digital revolution.
While the number
of English-speaking users on the Internet increased by
about 150 percent since 2000, the number of
Arabic–speaking users increased nearly ten-fold.
Portuguese speakers increased more than 500 percent and
Chinese, French and Spanish-speaking users
weren’t far behind.
And of course
China’s more than 1.3 billion people are in the
early adoption phase of the Internet revolution. Fewer
than 14 percent of Chinese are online, and as more of
them get connected to the network they’ll be
looking for sites in their native language.
So where is all
this push toward a multilingual internet taking us? If
I can’t understand your Web site and you
can’t understand mine. What have we accomplished?
"Of the 40,000 languages we conceived on the
planet only about 6,000 to 9,000 remain, and of them
less than 500 have digital existence," said Daniel
Pimienta, president of Networks in Development
Foundation. "Of these, less than 50 languages
gather more than 99 percent of the content of the
Internet. To reduce cultural diversity is to jeopardize
the possibility for our species to evolve and adapt. If
the Internet is truly for everyone, then its
responsibility is to embrace the issue of diversity and
give it the priority and attention it deserves. We must
turn the virtual Babel into the model of respect and
diversity that collective intelligence is capable of
building to feed human creativity and
development."
Adama Samassékou,
a leader of the World Summit on the Information Society
and president of the African Academy of Languages, said
there are three primary challenges when discussing
diversity at the global level. "The first is how
can we transform what is commonly called the digital
divide into the 'digital for everyone,'"
he said. "The second is how can we use information
communication technologies to accelerate the process of
achieving the Millennium Development Goals. And the
third is how can we strengthen, promote and develop
cultural and linguistic diversity, which is the main
universal common good? The diversity we experience is
the best instrument for dialogue between cultures and
languages. Culture lies at the core of any discussion
of identity, social cohesion and the development of any
economy based on knowledge."
Developers are
trying to design more sophisticated translation
software. An approach called "statistical machine
translation" is being used to develop a
20-billion-word world translation base. In the
meantime, Babelfish, Google Translate and other
extremely rough translation systems are in use, and
more Web sites are being developed to provide content
in multiple languages.
Diversity also
means opening the Web up to people who have
disabilities, and those who are illiterate.
The Daisy
Consortium expands usability by creating Digital
Talking Books. DeafPlanet is a site that emphasizes the
use of large symbols, bright colors and loud noises.
Optional features also allow those with hearing
disabilities to follow audio on the site through sign
language.
Work continues to
fully include the disabled and illiterate online. For
instance, the Internet Society and other organizations
support a global standard of usability known as
"universal design." At the major IGF session
on Diversity, Monthian Buntan, president of the
Thailand Association for the Blind, read from a script
in Braille as he spoke as an advocate for the 650
million people with disabilities. "For us,"
he said, "Internet accessibility could be made
through the concept of universal design and the use of
assistive technology. By embracing these we can truly
accept and practice and respect diversity and move
toward an inclusive and accessible information society
which is caring and peaceful and barrier-free and
happiness-based for all. Such a standard is open,
nonproprietary and it embraces synchronized
multimedia."
Providing content
that is useful to people of all abilities presents
significant technical and economic challenges. But the
prospect of bringing a more diverse mix of users to the
Internet offers rich benefits.
The promise of
diverse users contributing more diverse content can
bring forward the wisdom of indigenous people, the
magic of ideas that are a bit – or even a lot
– out of the mainstream .the vision of an
isolated, but talented thinker or artist. The
cross-pollination of concepts that can advance humanity
in ways we may not now imagine.
When people at
the Internet Governance Forum discuss diversity, they
are also discussing the need for open software and
internet architecture standards that everyone can use.
Bringing the internet to other under-served groups,
including older persons and, in some cultures, women.
And public policies that support user-generated content
online.
Samassékou urged
direct action moving forward. "We must leave here
with a determination to show that between now and next
year's IGF in New Delhi we see improvement in
freeware translation software," he said.
"Technologies can promote dialogue between people
speaking several languages."
From the
beginning, the concepts of the Internet have been built
around empowerment, allowing people everywhere, in
every circumstance, the power to make a difference
globally. This, then, is the promise of diversity, and
moving all of us toward that goal is the reason
meetings such as this are so important.
(Dannika Lewis and Dan Anderson were
contributing writers for this article.)
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