Breaking Language Barriers Online

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
75,399
English is the predominant language of the Internet, making up about 56% of all pages online, but what about the remaining 44%? Automatic translation sources are the key to complete Internet surfing these days, but at this point it’s more of an art rather than a science. We still have a long way to go to get translation perfection.

According to the translation firm Smartling, native English speakers only represented 3% of the total Internet population in 2011. Yet, 56% of online pages are English-only
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riot8ap said:
I feel like I see language being abused each time I'm on the internet...
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Fixed that for you.
I've noticed many folks seem to go out of their way to obscure their meaning. The worst are not those who use little known acronyms, game speak or l33t speak but, those who can not communicate in any language.
 
I'm surprised we've gotten down to 56% English. Remember back when the internet got up and going and addresses were actual URLs that got you the same page/content anywhere in the world?

Now you get content blocked or removed depending on which side of a geographical border you're on.
 
English 101 Kick-ass
1. Tucker (tuk-r)
2. Money (mun-e)
3. Give Tucker Money

Don't know why but language barriers always remind me of this episode from RvsB.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJzLLO7wmmg

Though honestly, what's the big surprise? English is not the main language for a lot of people, but most countries now accept English as the universal language. Most Europeans speak English, if they weren't born around the time period of WW2. Most of Europe's road signs are in both native and English languages.

America, Canada, Australia, and most of Europe speaks English, and lets be frank, those are the countries that matter. Music sounds best in English, and most of our entertainment is in English. Programming languages like C++, assembly, and python are using English words. Every other language is now a dead or dying language.

Also yea, Futurama.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7osGfFTQVtU
 
Ashbringer said:
English 101 Kick-ass
1. Tucker (tuk-r)
2. Money (mun-e)
3. Give Tucker Money

Don't know why but language barriers always remind me of this episode from RvsB.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJzLLO7wmmg

Though honestly, what's the big surprise? English is not the main language for a lot of people, but most countries now accept English as the universal language. Most Europeans speak English, if they weren't born around the time period of WW2. Most of Europe's road signs are in both native and English languages.

America, Canada, Australia, and most of Europe speaks English, and lets be frank, those are the countries that matter. Music sounds best in English, and most of our entertainment is in English. Programming languages like C++, assembly, and python are using English words. Every other language is now a dead or dying language.

Also yea, Futurama.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7osGfFTQVtU
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Did your mother drop you on the head as a child?
 
GotNoRice said:
I find that statistic laughable.
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Yup, that's pretty absurd. And non-English speaking people are sometimes locked away in their own national network. Countries like China, Iran, Australia, and probably Puerto Rico all block or attempt to filter the rest of the Internet. Since those aren't native English speaking countries, I'm pretty sure the percentage of websites that are English language are representative of the global Internet.
 
GotNoRice said:
I find that statistic laughable.
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The numbers were put forward by Smartling, a company with an interest in selling it's translation software and services. It is likely that the 3% number is a twisting of data to facilitate sales, or an out right fabrication to facilitate sales.
 
BDV said:
Did your mother drop you on the head as a child?
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That may have happened to him, but he is sort of correct.

Regional languages are not really dieing out, at least not for the next several dozen generations, but many languages are being corrupted by English, and other more dominate languages like Spanish.
I don't know that it will be English, though thanks to the British Empire, and later the UN, it does have a head start, but a world language is both desirable, and virtually inevitable.
 
3% sounds about right. I mean, if what they're speaking in Cork or North Dublin was English, we would understand it, right?

Haha, thenextweb author did not read or understand the smartling article, the 3% is not the percentage of native English speakers, as is obvious when Northern America alone represents 13% of the global Internet users. The 3% is the margin by which English (27% of users) dominates the next language, Chinese (24% of users) in 2011. It used to be a 26% margin in 2000 (39% English vs. 13% Japanese).

It's an approximation anyway, as English speaking countries are counted as a whole, not by the percentage of native English speakers they host. I never fit any stats...
 
I have to say this. Coming from someone that speak Mandarin Chinese and read a little Japanese and very little German, English as a Lingua Franca has far better appeal than any other of the dominant languages today.

English has had the benefit of real utility in the sheer universal size of medium for the last century, nevermind the technological ubiquity of the language. The appeal to use Spanish outside South America is limited as Spanish simply does not have this crushing weight of media at hand.

Chinese as an online language is still reliant on the English keyboard as input is done by Romanized Pinyin phonetic system in Mainland China (other input means exist, including writing each character by hand). Japanese also rely on Romaji for input, which all assured familiarity with the the standard alphabet. English also has a memetic elasticity which makes universal naming of multimedia memes possible. In fact, it has come to the point that Romaji form of mutated memes would be used directly in places such as Taiwan, or converted into some form of Kanji...
 
@Reimu Since we now live in a global world, it is obvious that we are heading to a world in which everybody will speak English. And sooner than we think at that...
I wonder if non-English speaking countries are already thinking about how both their native languages and English can coexist harmoniously.
Or what measures English speaking countries are taking or plan to take to respect these other languages and cultures.

And being bilingual is only the first step of our evolution. In times, we'll be bipolar, bisexual, etc. ^-^
 
I read pages natively in portuguese & English (My wife is from Brazil). Portuguese there does borrow a lot of words from English.

I remember how surprised I was when I heard "shopping" used a noun in Brazil.

The funny thing is computer words sometimes are very close and sometimes VERY different

Motherboard = "placa mae" (board mother, literally)
Video card = "placa video"
Power Supply = "Fonte" ("source" if you translate it...short for power source?)
 
@Robstar Actually Brazilian borrowed it from French: "je vais faire du shopping" (I am going to do le shopping) ^-^
 
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