Language and Internet

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Bias Keeps Internet From Global Expansion

Dec 19, 1:36 AM (ET)

By ANICK JESDANUN


GENEVA (AP) - Rahul Dewan typed "India" into the search box of an online
stock photo service, hoping to find digital images of his native country.
He found only three - all of flags. Dewan then typed "Switzerland," a
country smaller than his, and found 33, while "USA" returned 72. His
demonstration underscores a major challenge in getting the developing
world online: Even with access, the Internet remains meaningless to most
of the world's population, its Web sites heavy in English and reflecting a
Western tilt.

Dewan, managing director of the New Delhi software company Srijan
Technologies, ultimately settled for Western faces and hands on his Web
site, after failing to find Indian images he could use or a similar photo
service catering to Indians.  So much for promoting his company as a
homegrown business. "They probably think this company belongs to somebody
in the USA," Dewan lamented at last week's U.N. information technology
summit. "Everything caters to the Western audience."

People and organizations who work on connecting villages and schools
throughout the world say their efforts only begin with providing Internet
access and teaching people how to use computers. There must be compelling
information, in native languages and mindful of local traditions and
distinctions - such as audio and illustrations for the illiterate.
"Getting technology into people's hands is one thing. Getting people to
use it is key," said Daniel Wagner, director of the International Literacy
Institute at the University of Pennsylvania.

Much of the Web these days is built by private ventures - mostly in the
West and mostly targeting where they believe the money is: the
industrialized world.

As a result, there's little specific to developing countries, which remain
largely offline. According to the U.N. International Telecommunication
Union, 1.5 billion villages have no access at all to phones or the
Internet, and 70 percent of Internet users live in countries that make up
only 16 percent of the world's population.

Some delegates to last week's U.N. World Summit on the Information Society
complained that even when Web sites aren't in English, they are usually in
French, Spanish or one of a handful of other languages common in the
industrialized world.

Adama Samassekou, Mali's former minister of education, said languages
spoken by millions of Africans, including Mandingo and Kiswahili, are
virtually nonexistent online.

With more than 95 percent of Pakistan's literacy base in Urdu, the
Internet is relevant to only the country's elite 5 percent, said Awais
Ahmad Khan Leghari, Pakistan's minister of information and technology.

The solution involves more than translating English sites.

To address illiteracy, South Africa is developing speech recognition,
text-to-speech and other voice technologies, starting in Zulu. An open
source model will let others adapt the tools for additional languages at
little cost.

Sherrin Issac, a policy director at South Africa's Department of Science
and Technology, said many existing, Western technologies are inadequate -
one voice compression algorithm, for instance, drops some "clicks" in
conversations, changing the meaning of words.

Bulgaria, South Korea and other countries, meanwhile, are producing
government sites in native languages. But Internet users often must type
English addresses to reach them.

One Korean company, Netpia, has developed a proprietary keyword system, so
a Korean typing "Yahoo" in that language would automatically get the
Korean version of Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) Netpia executive Jason Sohn said some
sites saw traffic triple after using such keywords.

The Internet's key oversight body also is studying domain names entirely
in non-English characters - instead of requiring ".com" or another English
suffix.

Other challenges remain.

The Canadian government still must adapt its internal search engine to
accommodate online materials in Inuktitut, the Inuit language. English and
French speakers can find synonyms like "fast" and "quick" in one search,
but extending that capability to Inuktitut first requires creating an
electronic dictionary.

In recent months, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) began a local language program to
help universities and governments adapt its software to more languages.
King Letsie III of Lesotho, meanwhile, is promoting open source and free
software as a way to let countries adapt tools for their domestic needs.

A desire also exists to ensure that Web sites are culturally relevant -
not limited to white faces, U.S. dollars and Western values. That, for
instance, could mean write-ups in support of marrying cousins, a union
rejected in the industrialized world.

Jerry Kennelly, whose Irish-based photo service Stockbyte was the site
Dewan had demonstrated, acknowledged that only a fifth of people featured
there are non-Caucasian, reflecting marketing demands.

"We're not in the business of running a charity," Kennelly said. "The
minute we see a justifiable demand, we will be on it like a dog out of the
traps at the greyhound races."

Until then, the task of diversifying content has largely fallen on groups
like Viva Rio, which has trained residents of Brazil's urban slums, the
favelas, to write about themselves, countering the news about crime and
other problems dominant in Western outlets.

"The point is to produce more content that is useful," said Bernardo Sorj,
an adviser to Viva Rio. "If people go on the Internet and do not find good
content for themselves, then they go to pornography."

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20031219/D7VH9OPO0.html