nology
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.

c) 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 dictionaries as well as
the everyday interactions of the nontechnical user. The latest version of
NetGlos is the Russian one and it should be available in a couple of weeks or so
[end of September 1998]. It will no doubt be an excellent example of the
ongoing, dynamic process of 'Russification' of Web terminology.

d) Linguistic democracy

Whereas 'mother-tongue education' was deemed a human right for every child in
the world by a UNESCO report in the early