Electronic Networks - Building Community, 2002

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E-diversity: the potential for, and barriers to, a multilingual web

Andrew Cunningham Multilingual Technical Officer Accessibility and Evaluation Unit, Vicnet State Library of Victoria

Operating systems, web browsers and web standards have been evolving, providing greater support for languages. This development occurs within a paradigm of monolingual and bilingual environments rather than multilingual environments.

Within these technological borders, a number of multilingual web sites have appeared. Each fitting within a site architecture that makes assumptions about multilingual information access models.

Thus confined, certain languages become more feasible than others. The feasibility of the language is dependent on the support of the language within the web browser and the operating system, and most importantly it should be dependent on the impact that a web site would have on a language community. Our active participation in multilingual web site design involves choices. Will our choices benefit the language communities?

What are the practical realities of presenting multilingual information on the internet, given the potentials and barriers of the current technology?

These issues will be addressed in the presentation