[lac-discuss-en] NY Times : A Web That Speaks Your Language

[Dev Anand Teelucksingh]

IN the early years of the Web, nearly all of its content appeared in 
English. But that is changing quickly. Today, articles on Wikipedia are 
available in more than 200 languages, for example. And about 36 percent 
of the seven million blogs running on WordPress, a free software 
platform, are in languages other than English, according to the founder 
Matt Mullenweg.

Such changes create a challenge, says Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow 
at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. “We are all 
experiencing a smaller Internet than we should be,” he said. “In the 
user-created Web, we’ve created a weird dynamic where there is more out 
there every day — some of it important — but each person can 
individually read less of it because it’s in multiple languages.”

A number of services, automated and human, are helping to translate what 
Mr. Zuckerman calls “the polyglot Internet.” Once-expensive machine 
translation technology is now available free at sites like Google 
Translate, which offers translations in 41 languages. At these sites, 
users can input a block of text, and a machine-generated translation 
pops up almost instantaneously.

Read rest of article :
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/business/17proto.html