Toppling the new Tower of Babel Analysis/Humor Once upon a time, according to the Bible, all the world spoke a single language. Perhaps that language was English. Apparently, the creators of the World Wide Web felt foreigners should learn English and stop being ornery. Besides, English happens to be the language of the engineers of Babel: Silicon Valley software programmers, New York investors, and of course most of the initial mass of average users. If you happen to be a foreigner with a hook-up, tough luck, Chuck. Fortunately, the World-Wide Web is getting wider. As it broadens, it begins to encompass Europe, the Balkan states, Israel, India, Japan, and the rest of the known world. Take my friend the "Countess," who's Armenian. Her husband, a software programmer, has created an e-mail program that displays the Russian alphabet and an on-screen Russian keyboard, so she can write to her relatives. Good old Russian ingenuity, I say. She says, "Pshaw, he's good with his hands." Should she sell the program? "Nonsense," she confides, "nobody sells software." I see her point, Babel rises because the people of the Earth have yet to assert the monetary value of multilingual babble. Another friend of mine (yes, I actually have two) admits that he has yet to see an e-commerce site in a language besides English. Does he suppose that the rest of the world is still trading in goats? Nevertheless, when will the Web rise to world-wide accessibility? Perhaps the time has come for the rest of the world to punish the proud Anglophile. For surely, if the rest of the world doesn't catch up, the English-speaking will think that they can do anything they have a mind to. As the Bible says, "Come, let us go down there and confuse their speech so they will not understand what they say to one another." And men shall be dispersed again. If you buy a French version of Windows and, say, Word for Windows, the Windows operating system automatically calls up the appropriate alphabet and presents screens, menus, and documents in French. The same rule applies to Netscape and Internet Explorer: these programs call up the character set indicated in the Preferences. Now, what's the problem? Navigating between character sets, for one. No-one seems to want to devise a multilingual operating system that "flips" from one language to another like a television channel. Nor do character sets appear to be complete: many foreign languages have accents and symbols that aren't represented in the conventional repertoire of characters. An effort is underway to implement Unicode, a complex, full set of letters and symbols. Altavista, the search engine, offers an on-line text translation tool. By cutting and pasting an English "block," you can get an immediate, if sometimes downright faulty translation. Now, how do say that in Urdi? French Version: Renversement de la nouvelle tour de Babel September 1, 1999