WRITTEN ON September 12th, 2006 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized
There’s a United Nations portal which benchmarks 177 countries for e-readiness (with the US heading the list) and e-participation (with the UK as world benchmark, it seems). There’s a lot to get one’s head around, but it seems that richer countries are more stuck into all this than poorer ones, and that English is disproportionately online. Half the world’s English speakers are online and a tenth of the world’s non-English-speakers. Wow.
This MAY be true for e-government, but I saw recent figures (from Stanford Online Conference?) which (if I remember correctly) showed that 42% of web-sites are in languages “other than English” and that Asian language web-sites are the fastest growing sector.
Most of our web browsers and search engines are set to ignore non-English web-sites so we English speakers see these only when eg. trying to find technical details to help fix our latest electronic toy!
Things change quickly: At school, I had to study “technical German” so that I could access many of the world’s (then) most advanced technical research papers.