WSIS - MULTI-LINGUALISM AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 04 PARIS 003322 SIPDIS SENSITIVE FROM USMISSION UNESCO PARIS FOR IO/UNESCO E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: KPAO EAID ECON UNESCO SUBJECT: WSIS - MULTI-LINGUALISM AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY ¶1. (SBU) SUMMARY: This is a joint U.S. Mission to UNESCO and U.S. Mission Geneva cable. A joint ITU/UNESCO symposium on "Multi-lingualism in the Internet" was held in Geneva from May 9 to 11, 2006 followed by a UNESCO Meeting on Cultural Diversity (WSIS Action Line C8) and the Internet on May 12. In the first of many WSIS-related meetings, the symposium featured panels of academics and ICT professionals speaking about the necessity and specific ideas for increasing multi-lingualism in cyberspace. Participants raised a plethora of ideas such as how to include a language on the Internet, translation aided by computer software, internationalized domain names, technical standards and solutions and the omnipresence of English content on the Internet. Participants in the first meeting included Elizabeth Longworth, Director of UNESCO's Information Society Division, Houlin Zhao, Director of ITU-TSB, and Charles Geiger, Executive Director, WSIS Secretariat. Many participants joined with Longworth and Katerina Stenou of the UNESCO Culture Sector at the May 12 meeting of C8 stakeholders to nominate UNESCO as the lead facilitator of the C8 and to establish themes to guide the C8's future work. Stakeholders will discuss these themes on line over the next two months before adopting them in final by the end of the summer. These themes are discussed in paragraph 15 of this cable. END SUMMARY. -------------- UNESCO VIEWS -------------- ¶2. (SBU) Longworth gave an opening speech at the May 9-11 conference stating that Multilingualism is a political imperative to democratize our societies so that everyone can make a contribution. (COMMENT: This is consistent with her view that language and local content are fundamental to access, which in turn allows the individual to benefit from the free flow and exchange of information on the Internet, thus strengthening democratic development. END COMMENT.) At the same time, UNESCO's Claudio Menezes pointed out that 90 percent of the world's languages are not represented on the Internet, while inaccurately stating that English content currently takes up 72 percent of Internet web space. Other speakers noted that the 72 percent English figure dates from 2001 and has since fallen to between 55 and 60 percent. Menezes still insisted that there is a need for greater diversity in both language and content on the Internet. He described UNESCO's efforts to promote both by raising awareness of the need for greater diversity, proposing appropriate policies, and implementing pilot projects. He reported that UNESCO is currently financing a pilot project on digitalizing the African language, N'Ko. Menezes also noted that the organization marked a weeklong series of events on linguistic diversity for International Mother Language Day in February 2006. He later privately stated that the May 9-11 meeting was considered a UNESCO experts meeting, and that UNESCO's role was above all to listen, compile a report of the findings and then see what kind of action it might be able to take. Longworth stated that she was pleased to partake in the first joint UNESCO-ITU meeting on WSIS issues and that it was natural to join forces during an era of budget cuts. She stated that UNESCO would remain "agnostic" on technical issues and added that for UNESCO, the Internet is a body that should resist regulation. She said that she wanted to increase local content while maintaining cultural integrity so that a language is preserved as much as possible when it is subjected to technology. -------------- UNIVERSAL NETWORKING LANGUAGE -------------- ¶3. (SBU) Tarcisio Della Senta of the United Nations Digital Language (UNDL) Foundation spoke about establishing digital infrastructure to promote multilingualism on the Internet. He asked what ICT professionals needed to do to move from well-meaning declarations to actually achieving a multi-lingual Internet, which includes processing and accessing information, creating and producing information, as well as sharing and selling it. Della Senta asserted that such an Internet would be universal, equitable, and diverse in its languages and cultures. This diversity would also apply to domain names, email addresses, keywords, local content, and encoding scripts. To this end, Della Senta's foundation has created a universal networking language (UNL) under the purview of the UN. UNL is an electronic language that empowers computers to intercommunicate and to process information and knowledge written in natural languages, across language barriers. He said the technology, which is not profit-oriented, would remain under the UN to make it available on a global basis. -------------- HOW TO INCLUDE LANGAUGES: -------------- ¶4. (SBU) Marcel Diki-Kidiri of the Centre Nationale de la Recherche linguistique (CNRS) described the process that is required to include "new" languages on the Internet, especially a language that had formerly been an oral one. He stated that scholars or academics must first devise a written language that incorporates a stable spelling system and then establish reference texts such as grammar books and dictionaries. He said that they must then develop terminology that can be put into cyberspace including a website and address in the new language. This latter step involves coming up with scripts, (ie. Latin, Arabic, etc.) fonts and characters, and requires funding. Several speakers suggested that getting new languages on line was no longer just a question of technology but was also a social question. For this reason, they said, multidisciplinary teams were needed to address the issue - pairing computer programmers with linguists and cultural experts to get the job done, for example. ¶5. (SBU) A challenge to scripted non-ASCII languages remained, according to an Indian professor who stated that the widely used Unicode method does not always work to bring scripts online. He suggested that Microsoft was a "self appointed multilingual custodian of our national heritage" due to its decision to program some scripts used in India in a slightly altered way. -------------- TRANSLATION: -------------- ¶6. (SBU) Ivan Guzman of Igral, which has worked with Union Latine and UNESCO in the past, stated that he was creating a translation prototype called ATAMIRI capable of simultaneously translating from English into Spanish, French and German and reverse-from Spanish into the other three languages. He explained that its linguistic model is based on the formal language representation of the ancient Andean Aymara language, which has an algorithmic matricial structure making it possible to simultaneously translate from source language into various other target languages. However, at the UNESCO Cultural Diversity conference on May 12, many participants lamented the lack of any effective translation software. At the close of the conference, the Quebec delegate asked which language stakeholders should use to communicate with one another online. UNESCO responded that traditionally, English and French are used, because they are UNESCO's two official languages, but that it was a personal decision for stakeholders to use any language. Other participants stated that this would not work in practice since existing translation software was weak, but nobody endorsed the efficiency of using one or two languages to communicate. -------------- DOMAIN NAMES: -------------- ¶7. (SBU) Several participants at the May 9-11 conference stated the importance of distinguishing between internationalization of name space and the availability of localized domain names. They stated that it was vital to advance deployment of IDN (Internationalized Domain Names) because there was a huge demand for multilingual names on the Internet. Some said that DNS cannot be expected to provide an adequate platform. Others called for ITU and UNESCO involvement in harmonization of standards on IDN operational issues. ¶8. (SBU) Study Group (SG) 17 of ITU's Technical Standards Bureau, ITU-T announced that it has submitted an action plan for deploying International Domain Names (IDNs). The action plan studies various multilingualism issues including the existing or lack of technical background of national ICT professionals, network security risks, use of regional language tables, and liaison mechanisms. The SG has also prepared a questionnaire that will be submitted to ITU member states asking them to share their experiences in deploying IDNs. Once the questionnaires are answered, the SG will map out the problems member states have had and look at appropriate solutions. ¶9. (SBU) Tina Dam, Director of ICANN's IDN Programs, noted that her division focuses on the deployment of IDNs while emphasizing the Internet's stability and security, competition and choice, and independent bottom-up coordination. She reported that ICANN and the Internet community have appointed a group of leading experts from around the globe to a President's Advisory Committee on IDNs. This committee is preparing a proposal for a technical test of internationalized top-level domain labels to ensure that enabling multiple languages at this level will not adversely affect users. She also reported that ICANN's IANA registry allows for script-based tables in addition to language-based tables with "added functionality" to show the method used for developing the tables. Participants made repeated calls to not fragment the Internet as multilingualism moves ahead and asked organizations involved in IDNs to carefully consider the technical options - existing or new - to avoid this outcome. ¶10. (SBU) Another session focused on various IDN operational experiences within different regions of the globe. Fay Howard of the Council of National Top -level domain Registries (CENTR) oversees IDNs in Europe. CENTR has forty-one full members with 23 country code top-level domain names and another 25 million domain names registered. Howard noted that twenty-two percent of the organization's full members do not use the Latin script. Howard emphasized that enabling multiple languages to be added to the Internet would promote an information culture where people will be empowered, through access to information, to take control of their lives. ¶11. (SBU) Wang Feng of the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) described a regional approach in deploying IDNs in the Asian Region. Since China, Japan, and South Korea use many of the same characters, they have established a common organization to manage Asia Pacific cctld. He described the China/Japan/South Korea Joint Engineering Team, which is currently attempting to set up a language table for the Internet. Wang also shared that as of January 2006, China alone had 111 million Internet users, amounting to a five-fold growth in as many years. He pointed out that 99.8 percent access Chinese Internet content and that over 70 percent use Chinese content exclusively. -------------- KEYWORDS: -------------- ¶12. (SBU) Ayman El-Sherbiny of ESCWA talked about the challenges involved in developing Arabic IDNs. He reported that Internet usage rates in the Arab region are currently low and that there is weak digital Arabic content. To promote greater Arabic content, he described the possibility of collaboration between Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi speakers since they all use the same set of characters. Sherbiny further noted that the Internet Engineering Task Force is working on finding technical solutions to deploying IDNs in this region. He shared that a keyword system built on top of the domain name system appears to have greater success in retrieving items in local languages. A Turkish company also made a presentation on their keyword systems to show how Turkish speakers use their own alphabets to search for sites on the Internet. Participants stated that the system is also popular in South Korea. -------------- THE WAR OF LANGUAGES: -------------- ¶13. (SBU) As the debate shifted from technical issues to social ones during the May 9-11 conference, speakers stated that multilingualism is taking on a more societal dimension, or as Union Latine's Daniel Prado described, a human dimension. An Anglophone expert on privacy issues set off a heated debate when she asked if it might be possible to have specific instances where one language is used on the internet, for example, in the realm of security. This did not, she said, have to be English, but it could be modeled on the use of English for international air traffic control. One participant stated that a single language would not improve security, another said that technology should not impose one language on mankind, while another noted that English has already "squeezed out" other languages in fields such as science. Another complained that he has to use email to reach his grandmother who needed someone's assistance to read it. (COMMENT: The conspiratorial tone of the debate was reminiscent of the debate over Internet governance last autumn. END COMMENT.) As the debate grew more intense, the chair of the African Academy of Languages, a leader of the new World Network for Linguistic Diversity formed at Tunis, and a representative of the Catalan government all affirmed that multilingualism on the Internet is not about a "war of languages" against English, but about keeping English there and adding more and more languages on line to promote linguistic diversity. They described their goal as helping people to be rooted in their mother tongue and be open to other languages. The Catalan representative privately noted that it was unfortunate that many Spanish and French speaking participants were complaining to the UN about a situation (not enough content in their languages) whose solution lay in their hands (mobilizing their linguistic communities to deploy more content.) -------------- CULTURAL DIVERSITY: -------------- ¶14. (SBU) The May 12 conference on WSIS Action Line C-8, which followed the May 9-11 joint UNESCO and ITU conference was inconclusive. Although the goal had been for stakeholders to select areas of focus, debate was too long and disorganized for any conclusions to be made. A U.S. Library of Congress (LOC) official spotlighted the LOC's experience in placing indigenous content on line and suggested that it might be able to partner with stakeholder organizations on this action line. ¶15. (SBU) Stakeholders did endorse UNESCO as a facilitator for action line c-8, agreed to terms of reference and identified 4 possible themes or groupings under this action line. They include: linguistic diversity, local content, memory and heritage, and information society/cyber culture/cultural diversity. The last category is a loose grouping of crosscutting concepts mentioned in the C-8 such as gender and access for people with disabilities. Switzerland and France urged UNESCO to avoid creating too many topics and urged UNESCO to have topics rather than groups, while a Tunisian government controlled NGO stated that UNESCO should set up many groups and subgroups. UNESCO will provide stakeholders with a report of the meeting within 20 working days of May 12, and stakeholders will have 2 months to comment on it. Consolidated proposals for moving ahead, based on this report and online feedback, would be approved in September. ¶16. (SBU) COMMENT: The ITU meetings were significantly better organized and thought provoking than the May 12 UNESCO meeting. Adding to the confusion, not all of the morning speakers had been provided with badges and had to wait for 90 minutes to get into the building. The May 12 meeting discussion was unwieldy and participants were repeatedly reminded by the UNESCO secretariat to read the C8 Action line since many of their questions reflected a level of ignorance. From this, it is not clear how successful any initiative to enhance cultural diversity on line will be. One honest broker in the process might be the new NGO entitled "the World Network for Linguistic Diversity." In any case, we will have a better idea of what UNESCO's actual agenda is once it provides its meeting report in June. END COMMENT. Oliver