Information availability in different languages and various technological constraints related to multilinguism on the Internet

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the growth of multilingual access on the Internet, highlighting linguistic barriers and technological challenges that affect information availability across different languages.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of linguistic and technological constraints impacting multilingual information access on the Internet.

Findings

English dominates the Web but only 20-25% of the world speaks it natively.

Non-English users are increasing rapidly on the Internet.

Technological constraints hinder multilingual information dissemination.

Abstract

The usage of Internet has grown exponentially over the last two decades. The number of Internet users has grown from 16 Million to 1650 Million from 1995 to 2010. It has become a major repository of information catering almost every area. Since the Internet has its origin in USA which is English speaking country there is huge dominance of English on the World Wide Web. Although English is a globally acceptable language, still there is a huge population in the world which is not able to access the Internet due to language constraints. It has been estimated that only 20-25% of the world population speaks English as a native language. More and more people are accessing the Internet nowadays removing the cultural and linguistic barriers and hence there is a high growth in the number of non-English speaking users over the last few years on the Internet. Although many solutions have been provided to remove the linguistic barriers, still there is a huge gap to be filled. This paper attempts to analyze the need of information availability in different languages and the various technological constraints related to multi-linguism on the Internet.