The Polyglottal Internet
by: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.
http://www.everymail.com/
The Internet started off as a purely American phenomenon and seemed to perpetuate the fastemerging dominance of the English language. A negligible minority of web sites were in other languages. Software applications were chauvinistically illprepared (and still are) to deal with anything but English. And the vast majority of net users were residents of the two NorthAmerican colossi, chiefly the USA.
All this started to change rapidly about two years ago. Early this year, the number of American users of the Net was surpassed by the swelling tide of European and Japanese ones. NonEnglish web sites are proliferating as well. The advent of the wireless Internet more widespread outside the USA is likely to strengthen this unmistakable trend. By 2005, certain analysts expect nonEnglish speakers to make up to 70% of all netizens. This fragmentation of an hitherto unprecedentedly homogeneous market presents both opportunities and costs. It is much more expensive to market in ten languages than it is in one. Everything from email to supply chains has to be retooled or customized.
It is easy to translate text in cyberspace. Various automated, webbased, and free applications (such as Babylon or Travlang) cater to the needs of the casual user who doesn’t mind the quality of the endresult. Virtually every search engine, portal and directory offers access to these or similar services.
But straightforward translation is only one kind of solution to the tower of Babel that the Internet is bound to become.
Enter WorldWalla. A while back I used their multilingual email application. It converted text I typed on a virtual keyboard to images (of characters). My addressees received the message in any language I selected. It was more than cool. It was liberating. Along the same vein, WorldWallaกs software allows application and content developers to work in 66 languages. In their own words:
กWordWalla allows device manufacturers and application developers to meet this challenge by developing products that support any language. This simplifies testing and configuration management, accelerates time to market, lowers unit costs and allows companies to quickly and easily enter new markets and offer greater levels of personalization and customer satisfaction.ก
GlobalVu converts text to deviceindependent images. GlobalEase Web is a กJavabased multilingual text input and display engineก. It includes virtual keyboards, frontend processors, and a contextual processor and text layout engine for left to right and right to left language formatting. They have versions tailored to the specifications of mobile devices.
The secret is in generating and processing images (bitmaps), compressing them and transmitting them. In a way, WordWalla generates a FACSIMILE message (the kind we receive on our fax machines) every time text is exchanged. It is transparent to both sender and receiver and it makes a userdriven polyglottal Internet a reality.
About The Author
Sam Vaknin is the author of กMalignant Self Love Narcissism Revisitedก and กAfter the Rain How the West Lost the Eastก. He is a columnist in กCentral Europe Reviewก, United Press International (UPI) and ebookweb.org and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com. Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.
His web site: http://samvak.tripod.com
This article was posted on February 2, 2002
by Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.