There was a time when looking for information involved a lot of work and could be quite painstaking depending upon the subject of enquiry. The development of the Internet changed all that, and now a whole world of information can be accessed by anyone, anywhere in the world, with a personal computer and internet connection.
Initially information available on the Internet was largely in English. This created challenges for people who did not know the language. Fortunately, the rapid spread of the World Wide Web has been able to fill this gap and now we have a growing number of websites in other major and minor languages.
Though it’s a positive development, it has come with a cost. Earlier, people across the world accessing the Internet were united by a common language, English. This created opportunities for people coming from different languages and cultures to interact with each other. This will be diminished now as more sites come up in various other languages. Think about it, you are in a forum which supports multiple languages; you will most probably gravitate towards members who speak your own language. Say you are an American and the site also has Russian members. Most likely, the Russian and American groups would keep to their own groups thus losing out on a wealth of information they could gain from each other.
I do not in any way support the omnipotence of any single language. What I am saying is what if all the hundreds and thousands of languages used to communicate in the Internet could be translated into other languages. Say if you understand only English and you are in a virtual space where there are people speaking other languages as well, you could have the option of communicating with them in their language and vice versa, through instant translation.
We already have thousands of talented software professionals creating amazing open source software for use by everyone around the world. Why not have something on the same lines for language translation as well. There are probably millions of people, many more than software professionals, who are fluent in more than one language. Can a system be developed where people can produce translations for languages they know, and over the years we could develop a self-sustaining system which would unite people coming from different languages and cultures in the Internet. I am not taking machine translation into account because although it has come a long way, it still has to go far. Machine translation cannot match the accuracy and authenticity of human translation especially in the context of colloquial and informal language, and it just doesn’t work for certain language pairs like English-Hindi.
So let’s keep dreaming, and working, and praying for a World Wide Web united through translation.
