MODERATOR: Portnoy.
SPEAKERS: Chris Salzberg (Canada/Japan), Paula Góes (Brazil), Rezwan (Bangladesh), Claire Ulrich (France)
In the short history of global online communication, numerous thinkers have fashioned a vision of the Internet as a barrier-free forum for the inter-national and inter-cultural transmission of knowledge, ideas, and information. In practice, however, online communities are still divided by the differing languages they speak. Is online linguistic segregation a technical or cultural dilemma? Will machine translation tools such as Google Translate fulfill the promise of a multilingual web or is it up to human volunteer translators to construct bridges between language-oriented online spheres?