This record is a partial extract of the original cable. The full text of the original cable is not available.

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 
----------------------------- 
 
¶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: 
------------------------- 
 
¶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: 
------------- 
 
¶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: 
--------- 
 
¶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: 
--------------------- 
 
¶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: 
------------------- 
 
¶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