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.

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UNESCO VIEWS
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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.

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UNIVERSAL NETWORKING LANGUAGE
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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.

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HOW TO INCLUDE LANGAUGES:
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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.

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TRANSLATION:
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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.

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DOMAIN NAMES:
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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.

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KEYWORDS:
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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.

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THE WAR OF LANGUAGES:
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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.)

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CULTURAL DIVERSITY:
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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