Some Thoughts About the Unequal Language Distribution on the Internet
By: Hans Bool
Does knowledge and information (really) matter?
The Big Mac index (published by the economist) is about the price differences of the Big Mac at different places around the world.
You can read all about this at the site of the economist. In English. But this article is not about the purchasing power parity of which the Big Mac index is an example. This is about the information and knowledge behind the Big Mac Index. Information that is unequally distributed.
In 1998, 70 percent of the Internet websites were in English, followed by the German language at only 7 percent. Less than one percent was in Chinese (source www.netz-tipp.de).
Who will benefit most from this unequal distribution; citizens from countries like China, Japan, Russia, India and the Arabic countries? Or people from the English “focused” countries?
If Content matters, and all you writing and reading ezinearticles should support the hypothesis, than the benefits are for those countries where English is like a second language, open for most people – at least for everybody connected, but in a one way direction. Only, that is for people who do not master Chinese…
In the area of information and knowledge, the Chinese, Russians, Japanese, etc… have a competitive advantage over English speaking countries, just because they can retrieve information and knowledge, but we cannot retrieve information in exchange. An unequal trade-balance?
In 2000, the distribution changed somehow. According to the internet society (http://www.isoc.org) “only” 56% of the websites were in English and already 2.4% where Chinese. I mention China, just for the sake of the example.
“So what? …what’s in it for me?” For the moment probably nothing. But just imagine the leaders and leading countries of tomorrow? Who will they be? And what will this mean for western economies?
Some search engines investigate in the automatic translation services for different languages. And some languages are already feasible when translating from English. But this makes the distribution even worse.
By the way. Where do you think you can buy the cheapest Big Mac?
© 2006 Hans Bool
Hans Bool is the founder of Astor White a traditional management consulting company that offers online management advice. Astor Online solves issues in hours what normally would take days.
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