French vs. English as World/Global Languages

[Paul Frank]

Speaking of world languages, the Chinese Xinhua news agency has just
announced that the main Chinese-government website is now available in eight
languages. You may find it interesting that the English spelling they've
opted for is American rather than British. I find it interesting that
Esperanto is one of the eight languages:

China's Top Web Site Now Runs in Eight Languages
October 2, 2000 (BEIJING) -- The China Internet Information Center has added
six new foreign language editions, in German, French, Spanish, Arabic,
Japanese and Esperanto to its Web site to increase its total number of
languages to eight.
The content, style and pattern of the homepages of the new editions are
different from the Chinese and English versions so as to meet different
demands of Internet surfers living in different parts of the world.
The move to open the six new services has aroused worldwide interest,
according to sources at the Web site . Visitors from North America are
guided to hit http://www.chinaguide.org/english/ for quicker access.
The Web site, one of the major online information providers in the country,
was set up in 1997 and was renewed in August this year to attract more
viewers, the sources said.
(Xinhua News Agency)

Paul
________________________________________
Paul Frank
Business, financial and legal translation
>From Chinese, German, French,  Spanish,
Italian, Dutch and Portuguese into English
Thollon-les-Memises, 74500 Evian, France
paulfrank at wanadoo.fr or franktranslation at aol.com