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ICANN Mulling Multilingual URLs

griffjon writes "The Washington Post is reporting that ICANN is testing out fully multilingual domain names. These won't just be [non-western-language].com, but would have TLDs translated into other scripts, fixing annoyances for non-English speaking audiences. An example: 'Speakers of Hebrew, Arabic and any other language written from right to left must type half of the URL in one direction and the other half — the .com, .net or .org postscript — the opposite way.' Let's hope it goes better this time around: 'Next week's experiments use the domain name "example.test" translated into 11 languages. A previous model, however, used "hippopotamus" instead of "test." These plans went awry when an Israeli registrar realized the Hebrew word ICANN thought meant "hippopotamus" was an expletive and threatened to involve the Israeli government.'"

1 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Seriously by Panaflex · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Dude.. moderators are out of control.

    Ever read the moderation FAQ? Just cause you dislike him or his ideas doesn't give you a right to push an agenda. This is a fair comment - how do we deal with languages we don't know and can't even type?

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    I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.