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Showing posts from October, 2010

English bias on the Internet

These last few weeks I've been traveling in Italy, occasionally connecting by internet and email with folks back home. The advantage we have as english speaking professional is significant. English is the most popular foreign language, and while it may not be the language spoken by the most people, it is definitely the world’s largest "second" language and by far the first language of the internet. There may be a growing number of international websites in mandarin, arabic, spanish and portuguese many of the established sites cater to english speaking web users. Translation and geographic preferences for google, yahoo, facebook and other international sites is helpful for international users. Still many web users know or learn english to improve on the web experience. I find automatic translation of websites to be spotty at best. Some phraseology is not translatable, and words are translated with literal meaning that can be inaccurate. Knowledge is wrapped in languag