[Air-l] Hungarian and others

[elijah wright]

> I agree with your sentiment, but I think your information is out of 
> date. The percentage of Websites in English is probably in the range of 
> 60-65%, or perhaps even less by now --- still out of proportion to 
> speakers of English, but far less than 97%.


Some statistical work was done for UNESCO here last year that indicates 
that there is vastly less language diversity on the internet than is 
routinely claimed.

And I'm talking about whole orders of magnitude of difference, here, not 
just a few percentage points.

Don't believe the numbers provided by companies like Jupiter MediaMetrix 
and Nielsen Netratings.  They're garbage, biased heavily toward the goals 
of the corporations (in the case of Jupiter and its offspring, the sale of 
"translation services" benefits from the belief that the internet is 
linguistically diverse..).

Sorry that I can't provide a citation just yet; I know that the work I'm 
referring to is still under revision.

--elijah



>> About 10% of the world's population has access to the Internet but 97% of 
>> web sites are designed in English. If you need reference for these 
>> statistics let me know but unless we recognize the importance and validity 
>> of other languages in cyberspace, we can find ourselves on the receiving 
>> end of the global spectrum.
>> 
>> If anything, we should encourage research and scholarly contribution in 
>> other, lesser known (to the English-speaking world) languages.
>> 
>> Jarek
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