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Flash MX invades the internet
A large factor that contributed to the rich multimedia nature of the Internet is the Flash MX. It allows website designers add and flaunt their designs. Instead of the plain coding of the HTML, Flash allows a person to add colorful animation and...
Google, our internet in their hands.
Search Engine Tips. M. Pugh. Where there was once a myriad of ways to confuse and manipulate Google, one thing is now becoming apparent. The aim of Google is to present a fair and unbiased return for your efforts, genuinely rewarded whether large...
Having your personal portfolio on the Internet .....................
Having your personal portfolio on the Internet will help you infiltrate the workforce and get your identity ‘Out there’. If you’re an up and coming graphic/web designer just out of university, you’ll know it’s quite hard to break into the...
Internet Domain Registration - Establishing and Transferring Your Domain Name
If you're in business, one of the most important things to you may be your ability to establish an internet presence. Operating some type of functional web site for your business helps your customers find you, can present additional marketing...
THE INTERNET IS ALIVE!
The Internet is: - NOT an information highway for cruising - NOT a library for reading - NOT a game board for playing - NOT a resort beach for surfing - NOT a medium for chatting - NOT a shopping center for buying The Internet is...
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The Polyglottal Internet
http://www.everymail.com/
The Internet started off as a purely American phenomenon and seemed to perpetuate the fast-emerging dominance of the English language. A negligible minority of web sites were in other languages. Software applications were chauvinistically ill-prepared (and still are) to deal with anything but English. And the vast majority of net users were residents of the two North-American colossi, chiefly the USA.
All this started to change rapidly about two years ago. Early this year, the number of American users of the Net was surpassed by the swelling tide of European and Japanese ones. Non-English web sites are proliferating as well. The advent of the wireless Internet - more widespread outside the USA - is likely to strengthen this unmistakable trend. By 2005, certain analysts expect non-English speakers to make up to 70% of all netizens. This fragmentation of an hitherto unprecedentedly homogeneous market - presents both opportunities and costs. It is much more expensive to market in ten languages than it is in one. Everything - from e-mail to supply chains has to be re-tooled or customized.
It is easy to translate text in cyberspace. Various automated, web-based, and free applications (such as Babylon or Travlang) cater to the needs of the casual user who doesn't mind the quality of the end-result. Virtually every search engine, portal and directory offers access to these or similar services.
But straightforward translation is only one kind of solution to the tower of Babel that the Internet is bound to become.
Enter WorldWalla. A while back I used their multi-lingual e-mail application. It converted text I typed on a virtual keyboard to images (of characters). My
addressees received the message in any language I selected. It was more than cool. It was liberating. Along the same vein, WorldWalla's software allows application and content developers to work in 66 languages. In their own words:
"WordWalla allows device manufacturers and application developers to meet this challenge by developing products that support any language. This simplifies testing and configuration management, accelerates time to market, lowers unit costs and allows companies to quickly and easily enter new markets and offer greater levels of personalization and customer satisfaction."
GlobalVu converts text to device-independent images. GlobalEase Web is a "Java-based multilingual text input and display engine". It includes virtual keyboards, front-end processors, and a contextual processor and text layout engine for left to right and right to left language formatting. They have versions tailored to the specifications of mobile devices.
The secret is in generating and processing images (bitmaps), compressing them and transmitting them. In a way, WordWalla generates a FACSIMILE message (the kind we receive on our fax machines) every time text is exchanged. It is transparent to both sender and receiver - and it makes a user-driven polyglottal Internet a reality.
About the Author
Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He is a columnist for Central Europe Review, United Press International (UPI) and eBookWeb and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com.
Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com
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