sam miller wrote:
> I have a question for the group. Over recent years, I've spent a lot of
> time
> helping with the launch of websites in several South Asian languages. It
> has
> been a struggle - battling glyphs and Unicode, font downloads and embeds.
> And I've in turn been a bit astonished by the lack of interest in the
> subject from people I think of as technophiles. Have I been unlucky, and am
> I being unfair - but are most technophiles also linguaphobes?
Hi Sam -
I share your feelings about the general lack of linguistic diversity -
in my experience most people are linguaphobes, both technophiles and
technophobes. Access to machine translation may improve as the
technology develops, but at the moment it is far too inaccurate to be
really useful.
From the writer's perspective, it can be difficult (unless you are
skilled in other languages) to provide translations. Even if you can
translate, there are the problems you mentioned - alternative fontsets
etc. - to contend with. However, there are plenty of examples of
multiple language pieces, websites and other resources to be found - for
example the Gangart Awards http://www.gangart.com/awards/ is for
bilingual or multilingual/ multicultural arts & culture sites - but this
is not the norm...
chris
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