'Too much English' should encourage us

My Dad forwarded me this story from The Australian about a UN "forum on global governance" which decided that the prevalence of English on the Internet is drowning out those languages without a strong international readership, apparently those of Colombia and Senegal deserve special mention. For a start, this is what happens with languages, get used to it. This should, however, encourage us to hasten the development of translation programs.

I'm sure we've all Googled something and had those pages in Spanish, French etc come up because the word has the same form in those languages. Imagine a Google that automatically translated the pages and then brought up even more relevant results. Imagine then such technology in place in the boardroom, on the telephone and even just in the street where you can speak whatever language you want and be sure to be understood. Obviously there are other benefits too, in order for such technology to work more effectively, linguistic rules, phonetic, semantic and syntactic, will have to be more rigourously obeyed, thus providing languages with an yet another layer of natural protection.

This kind of 'mother-tongue' communication is sure to be the way of the future, and the sooner we are able to implement it reliably and universally, the more languages we can preserve.