TheInternational
Telecommunication Union(ITU), Unesco and
internet standards bodyIcannwill
collaborate on global efforts to forge universal standards towards
building a multilingual cyberspace.
The three agencies organised a workshop on the subject at this
week's
Internet Governance Forum (IGF) taking place in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil.
The partners said multilingualism is a key concept to ensure
cultural diversity and participation for all linguistic groups in
cyberspace.
There is growing concern that hundreds of local languages may be
sidestepped, albeit unintentionally, in the radical expansion of
internet communication and information, they said.
"The discussions are going to help Icann to keep moving toward
full implementation of Internationalised Domain Names," said Paul
Twomey, Icann CEO.
Following the evaluation of Internationalised Domain Names by
Icann, internet users around the globe can access wiki pages with
the domain name "example.test" in 11 test languages - Arabic,
Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi,
Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil.
The wikis allow internet users to establish their own sub-pages
with their own names in their own language.
The three organisations are also working towards issues covering
fonts and character sets, text encoding, language implementations
within major computer operating systems, content development tools,
automatic translation software, and search engines across
languages.