Multinational System and Multiple Languages

Kim Yu-gon

The general consensus is that English is considered as an ideal tongue on the Internet since the very beginning of the Internet. As the Internet was expanding all over the world and connecting different countries with different languages, English seems to reinforce its leading position as a world language than ever before. For the turn of the century, however, I believe that technology will enable the Internet users to use their own languages. They will not have to learn English to understand and communicate each other on the web. In this point, Internet will weaken the leading status of English as a lingua franca for the turn of the century because of the two factors: improvement of user interface and artificial intelligence.

The improvement of user interface will make English lose its leading status as a lingua franca of the Internet. Other countries--most of them are nonnative English speakers--reluctantly had to learn English in order to use the Internet. This is closely related with the fact that the Internet originated in the USA, a native English speaking country. When the USA first established the Internet in the late 60s, it was a local national network used only within the country for the academic and governmental institutions, which had a major and wide-ranging impact on the technological and language development of the Internet. When ARPANET was installed in 1969, for instance, for the American academic and governmental institutions, the technology of transmitting--such as SMTP, the first application protocols for transmitting e-mail messages--was developed and operated in English alphabet. And as the Internet began to expand the other countries began to participate in the American national network to benefit from the valuable information, which made them reluctantly had to accept the language of the net-originator. However, the situation changed. With the help of the convenient user interface of computers, many users, especially nonnative English speakers, don't have to use the protocols to access and utilize the Internet. The users come to learn and use the Internet without any particular knowledge of English even though they are Internet illiterates. To use the Internet, if they can simply click a certain icon, their computers handle the other complicated procedure. And the tools of the web browser including most application programs are also offered in multiple languages; so that menus and dialog boxes can be displayed in each other's mother tongue. "One Click Web Access" is a good case in point. It was developed two years ago for helping the Internet Illiterates use the Internet. With the program, we don't have to set up many technical settings and options; instead, it automatically makes the computer best-fitted to use the Internet. Hence, considering that the improvement of user interface will make us feel more comfortable in using the Internet in almost any language, English will not be an obstacle anymore to the nonnative English speakers on the web.

In addition to the improvement of user interface, English won't keep its leading status as a lingua franca of the Internet because of the development of the artificial intelligence; the rapid growth of technology for the turn of the century will enhance the translation potential of the artificial intelligence. Even though some optimistic scholars envisioned that the Internet users would use their own languages with the help of the machine translation, many of them still believe that machine translation is not reliable. What makes them not to use their mother tongues in spite of the development of the machine translation? The consensus of opinion for the reason seems to be that the artificial intelligence is not such a reliable technology; the translation potential of the artificial intelligence from English to their own languages can't provide such a high quality than they expect. For instance, many of the current translation softwares such as "English guide 2000" (translate from English to Korean) and "Korean guide 2.0" (translate from Korean to English) are not able to guarantee the high quality of the translations if the texts and documents have such extralinguistic features as slang and some colloquial expression. However, I expect that the situation will be changed. Many scientists predict that they will reach perfection of the artificial intelligence for the turn of the century; so that the machine translation will be brought to perfection--100% accurate interpretation including slang or vulgarism. For example, Stuart Russell, the author of "Artificial Intelligence: a modern approach," claims that "the computer will think and act like humans" for the last decade of the 21st century, describing the "natural language processing" to enable it to communicate successfully and "machine learning" to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and extrapolate patterns. Therefore, considering that the artificial intelligence has been improving as well as the machine translation, we won't need to use the bilingual dictionary for the interpretation of the texts on the web for the turn of the century.

Thanks to the development of user interface and artificial intelligence, we will not have to make an effort to use English on the Internet for the turn of the century and English won't be able to keep its leading position as a lingua franca of the world. Hence, it could be said that technology made English as a lingua franca, but English will lose its leading status just because of the technology.