The Internet goes International

[Middle Earther]

I'm really interested in reading comments on this. It sounds like this internationalizing of the internet is a good step, overall. Although, I'm with Rachel Maddow on this - I'm a little confused, too.

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOZSuoxf2jo[/yt]

I love that her internet geek is an attractive lady from "Boing Boing dot net", too.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

I have mixed feelings on it

 

[FordSVT]

I have mixed feelings on it

Why don't you tell us about them?

Who cares and what does it matter if web addresses can be in any language now? How could this possibly impact you in a negative way beyond cultural ego.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Well, I think it's good for other nations, but part of me thinks standardization is a good idea and there should be some universal language.

So the part of me that feels it's good for people who speak other languages is for it, the part of me that prefers standardization and a desire for their to be a universal language is opposed to it.

Regardless, as long as there will be reasonable means to type out text in another language using our keyboards, I suppose all will work okay.


CuttingEdge100

 

[Meredith]

charmap.....

 

[ThunderAeroI]

charmap.....

qft, toi a point. charr map wont work for most non-latin lanuage keybords

 

[Trekker4747]

It seems to me this could be better "solved" by having browsers that can convert foreign characters to English ones.

This won't effect me, or likely any English speakers, any as I don't often (re: ever) visit websites written in foreign language.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

It seems to me this could be better "solved" by having browsers that can convert foreign characters to English ones.

This won't effect me, or likely any English speakers, any as I don't often (re: ever) visit websites written in foreign language.

Er, how would they do that? To which English characters shall we convert Mandarin or Kanji or Persian?

 

[Trekker4747]

It seems to me this could be better "solved" by having browsers that can convert foreign characters to English ones.

This won't effect me, or likely any English speakers, any as I don't often (re: ever) visit websites written in foreign language.

Er, how would they do that? To which English characters shall we convert Mandarin or Kanji or Persian?

Guess, what I mean is a Persian would type in their characters for the word "youtube" (which would be the characters for "you" and "tube" or the closest word) then the browser -which would probably take some nifty AI-like program- would then convert those characters into "youtube."

Now, obviously, the switch after the "." could present a problem but for these purposes we'll drop it. So the person types in their language the nearest thing to "youtube" then their browser presents them with a list of websites that it thinks best matches that entry (which likely couldn't be too many) the person finds the one they are looking for, tells the browser that this one is it and the browser "learns" that whenever the person types in their language version of 'youtube' that the user is looking for "www.youtube.com."

I guess a bit simpler alternative would be for websites individualy, their hosts, or some other entity simply makes it so "www.youtube.com" is linked to nearest form in all languages so whatever language you use you can get to it.

Either of these sounds better than de-standarizing things and making things able to be registered in a zillion different languages so that everyone on the planet to effectively search the internet has to have a keyboard that can use various different languages (as opposed to how it'd be now and they keyboard is just the local language and English.)

I also kind-of wish browsers had something akin to a Universal Translator in them so that if I were to, for example, visit an Arabic website the browser would translate the website into English for me.

Given how complex, fast and amazing computers are these days I'm sure any one of these ideas is feasbale though, granted, it would take some top-notch programers to impliment but I know it can be done.

But, nah, it's probably just better to de-standarize things and now make the internet work on the hundreds of languages there are on the planet.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

It's not "de-standardizing" to allow multiple character sets to be used. The DNS system can work just fine with any character set you want. You just won't be able to type in URLs for sites if you lack the appropriate keyboard and don't care to use charmap to do it yourself.

Machine translation is a joke. Having some sophisticated system do all the work of transliterating domain names from one language to another is not feasible in the near term. What we'd really have to have is some human-defined translation table, perhaps some extension to DNS.

But odds are you and I will never have any reason to access a site whose domain name is in a non-English alphabet. Its contents will implicitly be in a foreign language. If they also wish to support an English version, they would have a version of the domain in English characters. I almost suspect ICANN is doing this so they can collect more domain registration fees.

 

[Meredith]

It seems to me this could be better "solved" by having browsers that can convert foreign characters to English ones.

This won't effect me, or likely any English speakers, any as I don't often (re: ever) visit websites written in foreign language.

Er, how would they do that? To which English characters shall we convert Mandarin or Kanji or Persian?

www.china.{mandarin}[monkey][horse][dog][food]

Something like this where you have to specify the language and the words....

 

[Robert Maxwell]

It seems to me this could be better "solved" by having browsers that can convert foreign characters to English ones.

This won't effect me, or likely any English speakers, any as I don't often (re: ever) visit websites written in foreign language.

Er, how would they do that? To which English characters shall we convert Mandarin or Kanji or Persian?

www.china.{mandarin}[monkey][horse][dog][food]

Something like this where you have to specify the language and the words....

I'm not language expert, but I know enough about Chinese to know that a system like that can't really be automated. Chinese characters don't just mean simple things all by themselves. They are also subject to context and multiple interpretations. The only way you could make such a translation matrix work is if it's hard-coded for each domain. There's simply too much subtlety involved to have it be something machine translation could cope with.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Robert Maxwell,

Good point