Internet Breaks Borders, However Languages Build New Ones

Can we break the laguage barriers?

[incrediBILL]

I find it interesting that the internet has broken down many borders now that people from many nations can easily exchange information. However, there are still borders based on what character set you use. Now the walls seem to be drawn around whether you use the alphabet, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Cyrillic, etc. . What I find interesting is that people using the alphabet tend not to be as interested in communicating with those that don't, and many not using the alphabet seem to learn enough to try to communicate with it.

I wonder if all of the translators now built into the browsers will change this as I find myself exploring sites and pages that aren't in English, that are Chinese, Hebrew or Arabic, even Ukrainian thanks to the translators.

I'm also wondering if the search engines, primarily Google, will start offering mixed language results when your best answer to the query is written in a language other then your own?

I often find that it's technical information I seek which isn't always in English, maybe it's Russian and thanks to the translators its now available to me and most of the time it even makes sense :)

Will the translator break the final language barrier or just be a bandaid to a bigger communications problem not do easily solved?

For me, I'm now finding most of the world wide web accessible, how about you?

[lucy24]

Oh, the irony. When you say "the alphabet" you seem to mean, specifically, the Roman alphabet as if it had some kind of primacy. Like saying I speak "language" while someone else speaks German or Chinese.

I can remember when Google learned to read polytonic Greek, about 8-10 years ago, because I use it fairly often in ebooks and it made a huge difference in searches. (Google still doesn't speak Inuktitut. I check periodically. I also got a nice confirmation of its ability to understand Greek, because I accidentally mis-typed a search term and got their "we think you really meant" results. Correctly, as it happened.)

Currently searches make a best guess about what language you're in, so your results aren't contaminated by words in other languages (using the same script) that have identical spelling but wholly unrelated meanings. And each language has its own inflectional rules, which come into play if you don't specify exact-match.

Google doesn't currently check whether you happen to have a font that can display non-Roman results. But unless you're running some antiquated version of Windows, this should not be a problem. And, since they admit they don't even read the "lang" tag, it is safe to assume they don't know from legacy fonts ("font"=some-specific-name).

I would be extremely hesitant to rely on machine translation for anything like technical material that requires exact interpretation. It works if you're looking at something like an non-English site's explanation of their robot's behavior ;) where you have a pretty solid idea of what they're trying to say, even if the translation makes a botch of it.

[Leosghost]

I find it interesting that the internet has broken down many borders now that people from many nations can easily exchange information. However, there are still borders based on what character set you use. Now the walls seem to be drawn around whether you use the alphabet, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Cyrillic, etc. . What I find interesting is that people using the alphabet tend not to be as interested in communicating with those that don't, and many not using the alphabet seem to learn enough to try to communicate with it.

Your 1st paragraph ( in which you write "the alphabet" <= my quotation marks , three times ) reads like you consider that English is the only form of "the alphabet"..

Which is not the case ..at all..
[en.wikipedia.org...]

"Autotrans", may, in many years from now, reduce current barriers that exist due to the use of different languages..
But as so much of language is dependent upon context..It would be very unwise to think that "autotrans" is accurate at the time we are writing..

You may not understand as much, or as well, as you think that you do, when using "autotrans"..

What is apparent is how well the English language absorbs and adapts, to the point where it is not hard to understand Spanglish, Franglais, Russlish, Chinglish, Japanish, Hindish etc ..The primary advantage of English is that it has no "masculin" and "feminine" "rules" , such as those in French for example..Thus one does not have to learn by "rote" the "sex" of words before one can use them..it also, unlike German does not sometimes make one wait until the end of the phrase for the verb..

I work with many different countries and with speakers of many different languages, I'm fluent in two, and can get by ( better than "autotrans" ) in 4 more..None of those I work with use "autotrans" as far as I'm aware..

Many here do not use English as their primary language every day..We already find the world wide web to be accessible..without "autotrans"..

edit .I note that Lucy24 ( I expected that she would ) posted some very similar points to my own whilst I was typing..I type slowly, as I have said before, all of our keyboards ( 10 ) are azerty ..and are not conducive to typing swiftly in English..

[lucy24]

all of our keyboards ( 10 ) are azerty

You can't change the (software) keyboard in Linux?! I'm appalled.

[Leosghost]

Yes you can, but I'd have to keep changing it back every time I type into a different program window..major pain..and many programs do not "remap" their "shortcut key combos" properly..especially if they are running under wine<= looking at you adobe..

Also the "top line" is different from qwerty etc..and when you are using more than one language at once (and need the "accents" for one of them )..switching is even worse..best compromise..one types more slowly in all of them..and leaves the keyboard set as it was out of the box..

some of the boxen are windows 7 ulti, and one is even xp pro sp3, needed for a particular software, but the win boxen are not allowed to connect to the web<= life is too short

[incrediBILL]

I work with many different countries and with speakers of many different languages, I'm fluent in two, and can get by ( better than "autotrans" ) in 4 more..None of those I work with use "autotrans" as far as I'm aware..

I speak English (obviously) , French (rusty) took 4 years in school and spent 3days in Paris so totally worth it LOL, a little Spanish, a few German and Yiddish phrases, that's about it.

But I'm finding I don't need it anymore as you point the phone camera to any foreign text and VOILA! it's in English.

Likewise, when confronted with foreign speakers, the cell phone translates it real time back and forth just like the Star Trek "universal translator", we built the damn thing at least for Earth languages. Just wait until we meet an actual alien, perhaps that technology will enable us to talk to them. Hard to know until it happens.

Anyway, my point was that I think the new technology is breaking down borders for people that don't speak a second language and the question was, do you think Google will ever go global and offer best match results in ANY language other than your own?

I think it's only a matter of time as they have the technology now, will they do it?

While it's not universally useful, for technical stuff it could be incredible.

For instance, electronics, HTML, programming, math, science is the same everywhere so why not offer mixed language results since the technological information will be the same everywhere. Maybe some German or Norwegian solved the problem best, or maybe the best solution was on a Chinese website.

Today you can't get those answers without manually switching to different languages for the query.

Some information is universal and should be easier to access and it isn't

Hopefully some bright guy at Google has a beta going on already :)

[graeme_p]

Google does sometimes show results in other languages and offer to translate them.

Minor languages are dying, and a lot of information does get translated into multiple major languages - there is a very good chance that anything really good written in Chinese will have an English translation. That said, in a good many fields the bulk of information is in English - I have a textbook by a Swede written in English. Why? Because it is the language everyone in his field works in.

In some ways I like some barriers to remain. Not to the flow of technical information, but to culture, so we maintain a variety of different cultures.