echnology
around the world. Popularization has now occurred on a global scale and English
is no longer necessarily the lingua franca of the user. Perhaps there is no true
lingua franca, but only the individual languages of the users. One thing is
certain -- it is no longer necessary to understand English to use a computer,
nor it is necessary to have a degree in computer science.

A pull from non-English-speaking computer users and a push from technology
companies competing for global markets has made localization a fast growing area
in software and hardware development. This development has not been as fast as
it could have been. The first step was for ASCII to become Extended ASCII. This
meant that computers could begin to start recognizing the accents and symbols
used in variants of the English alphabet -- mostly used by European languages.
But only one language could be displayed on a page at a time.

3. Technological developments

The most recent development is Unicode. Although still evolving and only just
being incorporated into the latest software, this new coding system translates
each character into 16 bytes. Whereas 8 byte Extended ASCII could only handle a
maximum of 256 characters, Unicode can handle over 65,000 unique characters and
therefore potentially accommodate all of the world's writing systems on the
computer.

So now the tools are more or less in place. They are still not perfect, but at
last we can at least surf the Web in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and numerous
other languages that don't use the Western alphabet. As the Internet spreads to
parts of the world where English is rarely used -- such as China, for example,
it is natural that Chinese, and not English, will be the preferred choice for
interacting with it. For the majority of the users in China, their mother tongue
will be the only choice.

There is a change-over period, of course. Much of the technical terminology on
the Web is still not translated into other languages. And as we found with our
Multilingual Glossary of Internet Terminology -- known as NetGlos -- the
translation of these terms is not always a simple process. Before a new term
becomes accepted as the "correct" one, there is a period of instability where a
number of competing candidates are used. Often an English loanword becomes the
starting point -- and in many cases the endpoint. But eventually a winner
emerges that becomes codified into published technical dictionarie