A Universal Networking Language for the Internet?

Anonymous Coward writes: "The United Nations University is developing a Universal Networking Language for the Internet, which is designed to allow effective communication between people writing in their native languages, with automatic conversion through an intermediate Meta-language (perhaps a precursor to Star Trek's Universal Translator.) They will be holding a symposium on the technology on 18 November in Brussels, Belgium, where they will publicly announce their achievement. They claim that the initial stage of UNL will support 16 languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, German, Hindi, Italian, Indonesian, Japanese, Latvian, Mongol, Portuguese, Swahili and Thai." An interesting idea, but this is one of those "the devil is in the details" things. It'll be interesting to see how/if this can work.