Top Ten Languages on the Internet

Many languages are widely spoken in the world. It takes a great deal of effort learning a new language enough to interact effectively. The most powerful medium through which it is possible to interact with people of different cultures from across the world is the Internet.

With increased globalization, cross cultural communication has become indispensible especially for online businesses. Most websites today are in English, a language that is understood only by one third of the world population. However, the importance of communicating in native language is being realized by shrewd businesses that strive to translate websites in different languages and transcend cultural barriers.

According to the Internet World Stats updated in 2010, the ten most popularly used internet languages include:

Legal Curiosities – Fact or Fable

Many laws are repealed or annulled and this leads to legal curiosities regarding whether a law which was in effect previously is still in vogue or not. Such laws could pertain to various diverse issues and a legal practitioner has to keep up to date with the latest laws and those that are no longer in force. This might also help in legal translation, where the translator should be aware of the source as well as the target country’s laws for authentic translation of legalities in a document. When the line between fact and fiction gets blurred, it leads to common misunderstandings and might have a serious impact on people’s lives, due to the misinterpretation of legal issues.

Some legal curiosities are plain stupid, while others are downright crazy but still others are really dangerous, and hence there are many people out there who would like to know about these. Being unaware of the fact or fiction nature of laws might easily land you in serious trouble. There are many informal books or lists of such laws where you can read about old laws, but none of it can be really exhaustive.

Why Men are more Action Gamblers than Women?

A casino is an institution which has gambling activities and is usually combined with restaurants, shopping, cruise ships and hotels and other tourist attractions. Nowadays, there are a lot of online casinos and for those playing such casino games there is casino translation software which can translate casino terms from one language to another. All you have to do is to select the source language and the target language. Since people from all over the world are using the internet today for casino gambling, it makes sense for the sites to provide casino translation.

UNESCO Protects Mother Languages

According to a UN report, 6,000 languages are now endangered

China's Xinhua news agency quotes, that the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) will promote the protection of mother languages by employing new information technologies.

The protection campaign is devoted to the International Mother Language Day, on February 21. It purposes to encourage Internet users to share photos, videos and stories by using new information technologies, such as the social media Facebook and Twitter. This way people can participate in this move and promote linguistic diversity.

New Google Translate for Android

The official Google Translate version for Android was launched in January 2010. Standard features like machine translation, romanization of non- Roman scripts and spoken translations, were brought to Android platform. In addition, Google Translate provided the voice input opportunity, and immediate SMS translation.

Free Wikipedia Translation Tool

So far Wikipedia has been mostly centered on the English language. If you go to the main Wikipedia page you will see that there are 3,463,000 articles written in English, 1,144,000 in German, 1,028,000 in French while there is a huge tail of languages that have less than 100,000 articles.

Today, Microsoft Research center in India and Wikipedia have created a joint project which would help users to create a multilingual content without putting too much of an effort into translation. It was launched on October 18th, 2010.

English  English vs Simplified  English

“A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.”

Gaston Bachelard 
(1884-1962) French philosopher and poet.

The Simplified English dictionary consists of approximately 875 words that initially were to be used in the technical documentations. Today some say the so-called Global English is a straight tool of globalization. Good or Bad?

Languages in Danger of Extinction

There are approximately 7,000 languages spoken throughout the world.  What some may not know about these languages is that around 1/2 or so of them will be completely obsolete within the next 100 years.  Although it is hard to pinpoint exactly which languages will go away for good and which will stand the test of time, experts in the field of linguistics have an idea as to a few of the languages heading for extinction.

Since the early days, languages were affected by colonization and migration. For example, Native American languages were replaced by English, Spanish and Portuguese as a result of the colonization initiated in the 15th century. The Coptic language was replaced by Arabic after Egypt came under dominance of Arabs in the 7th century.