The digital language divide

"The famous engine recognizing 30 European languages ​​[Google] recognizes only one language in Africa and does not use the languages ​​of America and the Pacific."

This is Daniel Prado, a language diversity researcher who commented on Internet equality and language issues in 2012. One of our main goals is to increase the number of languages ​​that can be used in search engines, but it is inevitable that if many small languages ​​are verbal or do not have standard spelling, There is a big challenge. Still, there are still more than 130 different languages ​​that you can search through Google among estimated 6,000 users that are still in use today.

Even in recognized languages, not all have the same traction. This is vividly explained by scholars Mark Graham and Matthew Zucker. He compares Google search on the West Bank in Hebrew, Arabic, English. They revealed a significant imbalance between language groups; searching in Arabic in areas ruled by Palestinians usually results in only 5% to 15% of the Hebrew results from the same search term . English search results are 4 to 5 times of Arabic.

In Wikipedia, the amount of online content in various languages ​​has considerable asymmetry. Among the 288 official languages, English is the largest version of the user, followed by German and French. On the other hand, there are almost nothing in many languages ​​in Africa and Asia.

Even if you speak the dominant language, you still have limited information only. You may think that there are many common themes and popular historical events in different language versions. However, the contents of various language versions are fewer than imagined, the concept of 74% is only one language, the concept of 95% is less than 6 on Wikipedia. Even the largest, and perhaps the most versatile version of English, contains only 51% of articles in the second largest German version.

Wikipedia is just a Web site, but even in this small Web site, the world of information on the Internet seems to be very different from language. Perhaps the famous quotation of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein requires a sentence that explains what it relates to today: "My language online limitation means the limits of my world."

To turn digital languages ​​off in diverse language areas like Asia requires more effort to translate the content on the web. I think that this work must focus on the design and implementation of the development of human translation networks by volunteers and changes in network technology infrastructure. Anyone who uses machine translation to translate between pairs of languages ​​other than English and romance knows that the quality of the machine translation engine is lacking and that the improvement is slow (in fact, the language Even a pair). A new language pair needs a larger translation data body before machine translation becomes effective, but still a platform similar to the existing language is necessary.

Dialogue over the Asian digital divide focuses on mobile technology and digital literacy, but the long-term language divide exacerbates the inequality and access problems of Asian "next next billion" Internet users I will continue. This paper argues that the task of resolving the digital divide and improving digital literacy needs to be combined with efforts to bridge the Asian language gap. Then from the empirical design and technical point of view, in order to make the latter 's activity sustainable and successful, by changing the way to activate the human community and build language data on the web what steps are It should be taken.

Howard Besser expanded the definition of the digital divide by arguing that the digital divide is not just about technology access between the rich and the rich. The digital divide includes information literacy, content suitability, and access to content. In addition to access, there are digital gaps among people who have the ability to apply critical thinking to technology. Because most online content is written in English, fluency in languages ​​and English is also an obstacle to the digital divide. Digital gaps include gaps between individuals with the ability to create digital content, or simply between consumers.