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The Internet Shifts East
Logic Bomb writes: "The San Francisco Chronicle has an article discussing the World Intellectual Property Organization's prediction that in less than 10 years, Chinese will be the most widely-used language on the web. Assuming the Internet becomes a truly global entity, this is an obvious (and mathematically correct) conclusion. On the other hand, the implementation of the Internet in places without certain civil liberties provides an interesting challenge to typical Western (idealist) notions about what the Internet does for society. Would you even consider the average wealthy Chinese citizen with online access truly 'on the Internet'? And how is the Internet supposed to draw people together when the same old language barrier still exists?"
Isn't China west from San Francisco ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Since when CNN is a news site ? I see similarities between Chinese people who read the People's Daily and westerners who watch CNN.
While the content produced will increasingly come in many different languages as we move forward over the next few years, I still see little movement on the actual programming front.
.. which ends up meaning that he/she also must understand English, thereby limiting the scope of the Web to those who at least have a passing knowledge of English.
Today, 99% of all programming is still done in English which ends up giving a definite bias towards English as the language of the web.
If someone comes out with some programming language that can be programmed in local languages and which gets popular, that is when I see a real shift happening in the base of the web. Otherwise, the content producer still ends up embedding their original language content inside English HTML
The latest UN statistics show China's per-capita income at $798 USD.
Does that sort of income enable the purchase of a computer, or the recurring costs of a phone line and ISP?
If it does, then what are the Internet applications driving this incredible influx of mandarin/cantonese users? Without the huge economic/retail motive that drove American adoption, it's hard to see the huge growth in users and services. And, obviously, there is absolutely no way this will happen by 2007, as it says in the article.
Well duh... sorry, that sounds rather america-centric. Do you really expect everyone else to learn english so you don't have to learn anything else?
SSL Certificate
The idea that Chinese will be the predominant language on the web is absurd.
China, despite recent moves towards a more open, capitalist society, has a problem that wont go away. Saw an interesting program on PBS a few months ago that discussed how China has changed in the past 50 years. Basically, you have a situation these days where the gap between the upper class and lower class is insanely wide. The wealthier segment of the population can often afford computers, internet access and the like, but this wealthier portion only makes up a tiny, tiny fraction of China's population. Meanwhile, the bulk of China's population are subsistance farmers who aren't allowed to even BE in (let alone conduct business in) China's main citiies. In most of these rural areas, electric power and indoor plumbing are considered high tech luxuries. Infact, China's national telecom infrastructure is considerably less extensive than most states in the U.S.
China's on the move, yes, but they have a looooooooooooong long way to go before their influence on the Internet becomes anywhere near as large as Europe's or America's influence.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Give it time. On a Pink Floyd mailing list I subscribe to, one of the more prominent posters is an intriguing fellow from Japan who doesn't speak English and has published a book in Japan about the band. He posts through a piece of software that provides translations both ways. The software is primitive and far from perfect. Frankly, it can sometimes turn out some pretty puzzling results (I often wonder how my messages to him come out.) Despite that, I--and many others on the list--have gotten to know him and value his contribution. I can see the development of this kind of software becoming more and more worthwhile as the Internet moves east. I look forward to it actually.
--Rick
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
There might be more people who can read Chinese as their first language than there are Anglophones... but what about the people who speak English or Chinese as their second language? I would say in that light that the internet would have more Anglophones using it.
Can somebody clarify this for me: isn't English one of the main second languages in India. And isn't the population of India supposed to surpass that of China within the next 10 or 20 years?
Numbers alone aren't significant, if they were Chinese (which, as the article points out, has so many speakers) would be the quasi-official language of multinational business, travel, etc..Right? But it isn't...English is. My point isn't to praise English (which in many ways is a very stupid language, technically), but just point out that the numbers only tell a very small part of the story. I won't even bother to point out that many of these Chinese speakers who get on the net will be in no position to contribute much to the global economy in terms of buying goods for import, etc, due to political and economical roadblocks.
There really are two classes of Internet citizens: those who have a fixed IP and can be information sources; and those who have dynamic IPs or are forbidden to run servers, and are pretty much restricted to being information sinks. Sure it's an oversimplification, but the vast majority of people on the Internet through home-connections, are second-class Internet citizens.
In Australia for example, it is significantly more expensive to be fully on the net - we're looking at 15 to 23 cents per received megabyte of data, and they're marketting megabytes (10e6 bytes). If one is happy with a proxied web service and a server-free presence, then for $80 a month one can download 3 gigabytes or more over ADSL.
Actually, after Mao died the Deng Xiaoping and his cohorts were pretty freaked out by what happened and they began to liberalize (in the British sense of the word... like free markets and the like) both economically (Deng actually had a slogan "It's not bad to get rich") and politically. But the Tiananmen Square massacre scared them shitless, especially when people other then students began to get involved. It was suppressed. And given the background (having experienced china in the 1940s and through Mao's crap... Deng had to endure a couple of struggle sessions himself) It's easy to see why they might have been afraid.
The problem is that when China looked around them to see what was successful they saw the Authoritarian capitalist states like Singapore, Korea and Taiwan. And they figured that it worked well. Taiwan has become a real democracy now though.
I think after the shock of Tiananmen wares off and things start to calm down again the restrictions will once again start to come off. Well I hope. Unlike Singapore, it's a pretty big country to hold with an iron fist.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Look, you can learn what 'color' and 'font' mean without knowing the rest of it. And almost all localization schemes still allow you to type in the roman space.
.. as a package name).
So while yeh, some things will be intuitive for English speakers, particularly things like APIs. while "font" might be easy javax.crypto.EncryptedPrivateKeyInfo (of course, Java does in fact allow Unicode for variable and class names, so you could have like
So, for a while I think most actual coding will be done in English, but that doesn't mean most website content will be. You could always have one web guy and one content guy as well. Or, for example you could use off the self software and fill it with localized content, (for example slashdot.jp).
And lets not forget, Ruby, a programming language quickly gaining popularity was actually crated in Japan, where it's now more popular then Perl.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This is unclear. Many many more Chinese speak English than other people speak Chinese. Just as Latin continued to be the main Church language, even in areas where it was not otherwise widely used, English may dominate on the internet whether or not the majority of current users are native English speakers.
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Don't forget India. (and Pakistan). Both have large English speaking populations (as a second language for a lot of people, though) India, in fact, uses English in the government. I'm not sure about Pakistan though.
Of course, unlike the US, England, etc, India has lots of native languages as well.
Oh, one other thing. All Chinese students need to have minimum competency in English in order to get into collage. More people may speak Chinese well, but English is really starting to become a sort of lingua fracia. Of course, soon enough instant translation will take over and the idea of learning another language will be a quaint little hobby.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
From: gascan@dcst16.pt (Bill Gascoyne)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: The dangers of extrapolation (was Re: Speed of Light
A cautionary thought on the dangers of extrapolation.
It is reported that in 1977 there were 37 Elvis impersonators in the world.
In 1993 there were 48,000. At this rate, by the year 2010 one out of every
three people in the world will be an Elvis impersonator.
:-)
Accenture -- formerly Andersen Consulting -- reckon this will happen by 2007. It's worth a read... especially the links at the bottom talking about cultural pollution (not necessarily in a negative sense!)
They're not often wrong.
The figures reckon that one billion people in China will be connecting to the Web by the year 2007. It sounds a it optomistic to me, and what exactly does "connecting to the web" mean. Someone who owns a PC and is connected... or just someone who uses a CyberCafe? I wonder if in China "people per IP" would be much higher than in Europe or America.
The vast majority of computers in china use Qwerty keyboards. Then an intelligent layer between the raw input and the application converts it into Kanji or whatever. They even work on context (at least the Microsoft software I have does). so if you type in "shi" you might get 'is', but if you type in "shi jian" the first "shi" will be the word for 'time'.
If you have a higher-end Nokia phone you know what that's like. You can type regular English on a 9 key keyboard and you only have to hit each key once. It's a rather weird feeling, but it works.
Actually 'intelligent layers' are good enough that Trendy teens in Japan can actually type kanji on telephone keypads!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If there was an award for talking out of you're ass, you'd probably stand a good chance of winning. As an American studying Chinese, I can say almost certainly that Chinese is a far, far simpler language then English.
Chinese, as far as I know (and I have had a couple of Chinese collegues), Chinese does not posses any of the advantages: it has a very large character set, a difficult prononciation with variations in how you pronounce a word and no easy to cathegorise grammar.
Wrong, wrong wrong. I don't know exactly what you mean by 'easy to categories grammar' but Chinese grammar itself is much, much simpler then English grammar. There are regional differences in pronunciation of Chinese, just as there are regional differences in the way English is spoke. There are no changes due to grammar however. Every word has the same sound regardless of it's grammatical frame (unlike English with "drive, drove, driving driven," and worse "is, be, being, was"). Also, when using the Pin-Yin system of Romanization pronunciation is not difficult at all. Certainly not any more difficult that that of a Chinese person or any one else for that matter trying to speak English.
Finally, Chinese characters are for the most part made from smaller characters and easily recognizable/memorable subcomponents. Writing and remembering characters is like spelling on a grid rather then on a straight line. Writing and memorizing them isn't difficult at all once you get the hang of it.
Of course, getting them into computers has been a problem in the past, but, modern technology has allowed their use pretty much without problems.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
And how is the Internet supposed to draw people together when the same old language barrier still exists?"
Because on the Internet, we can communicate through the universal language of pr0n. Well, unless you're in one o' them loser countries that filters it out.
~Philly
Because of the massive movement in China to teach it's children English, there have been a few estimates that say there will be more English speakers in China than there are in North America and Europe combined, by the year 2010.
... but I can pretty much guarantee that the majority of people with Internet connections will have basic English skills. Only the priviledged and educated classes have regular access to computers, and that's a pretty miniscule percentage of the Chinese population.
... only the people doling out the cash seem to band together and spend all the money in one place at a time .. like Bejing, for the upcoming olympics in 2008. It's basicaly a capitalistic, entrepenurial country, and it won't surprise me if the Internet floodgates spring open in the next five years.
After traveling around China, I'm somewhat skeptical
As a slightly off topic side node, what really surprised me about China was the lack of Communism. Sure, there's a good amount of government subsidising, but it's basically the same as it is in the United States
It's a virtual certainty that before 2010 most operating systems -- including the one in your "phone" -- will have a language translation module built-in, enabling anyone to communicate with anyone else in their native spoken and written language (if for no other reason, it's good for business).
"Universal Translators" are hardly science fiction...
--
Power to the Peaceful