International organizations: UNO supports multilingual Internet

The United Nations stands in the forefront of seeking to promote linguistic diversity in the interests of greater political, economic and cultural access for all.

 “Creating content in local languages is, and will be, as important as enabling connectivity in order to be able to reach and engage peoples worldwide, whether on economic, political, or scientific initiatives,” Undersecretary General for Communications and Public Information Kiyo Akasaka told the Second Global Seminar on Linguistic Diversity, Globalization, and Development in São Paulo, Brazil.

“But the statistic that is particularly relevant for our discussion is this: only about 35 percent of all Internet users are native English speakers. Yet English websites dominate the Internet, with almost 70 percent of all sites readable only in English,” he cautioned.

He cited the “crucial role” played by the media not only in reporting on local and world events in multiple languages, but with their educational services, from quizzes to language instruction, on their online sites.

Media companies are on the front line of developing new ways to translate the Internet into different languages, real-time translation of Internet chats is on the horizon, thanks to better and faster translation tools, and new technology is helping to add captions to videos automatically, helping those who are hearing-impaired as well as those who do not speak the language of the video, he said.

Akasaka cited the UN’s own role in producing and disseminating multimedia news products and services in different languages: its website available in all six official UN languages—Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish; UN webcasts of meetings of the General Assembly and Security Council in English and the original language of the speaker; UN Radio daily programming in the six official languages as well as in Kiswahili, one of the fastest growing languages in the world, and Portuguese.

The UN also produces weekly programming in 13 languages—the eight languages already mentioned, and Bangla, Hindi, Indonesian, Urdu, and French Creole. Meanwhile, the network of 63 UN Information Centers regularly produces information in more than 40 languages and maintains websites in over 30.