Translating Tweets, Traversing Cyberspace: A Digital Trip with the "Out of Eden" Walk

Online Language Communities: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

On good days, I typically log into my Facebook account, check out the latest cyberslang my former Turkish university students have crafted, and rejoice in the Internet's diverse linguistic ecosystem. I peruse the latest legal news in the Arabic blogosphere and most recently published political cartoons in Le Monde. Occasionally, I get ambitious and try to read a few pages on Pashto Wikipedia. I do not speak these languages fluently, but I've studied them and come to love them for their idiosyncrasies and for the gems that their speakers have to offer.

On bad days, I see the Internet as a linguistic prison, a place of infinite language barriers that seem almost as intimidating and impermeable as the great Chinese firewall. I come to terms with the ways in which my English privilege confines others; I surf Twitter, Google away, and think of all the other language communities that remain isolated and entangled by their monolingualism. 

I believe that the offline world has made substantial progress in providing better support to minority language groups. The U.S. Department of Justice is working to dissolve language barriers in the courtroom; the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Court, and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon have followed in the footsteps of Nuremberg's International Military Tribunal by developing their own Translation & Interpretation Units. The New York City Department of Education has hired a number of translators to help immigrant parents understand the never-ending flow of school documents that their children bring home. Translators, from the literary to the legal, are beginning to deliberate how to best empower themselves as well as their clients.

But, cyberspace is largely another story. In 2009, Ethan Zuckerman summarized the problem of the polyglot Internet: "We are all experiencing a smaller Internet than we should be. In the user-created Web, we've created a weird dynamic where there is more out there every day - some of it important - but each person can individually read less of it because it's in multiple languages."

A number of researchers have substantiated his concerns in the past few years. In October 2011, a Semiocast study of 5.6 billion tweets revealed that more than 2 million public messages were posted every day on Twitter in Arabic, up from about 30,000 in July 2010. Two years later, in 2013, Internet World Stats estimated that the number of English speakers only represented 28.6% of all Internet users. This map by two researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute helps visualize how digital divides and language barriers collide.

There have been a number of recent endeavors to make room for more language groups online and to provide them with the tools they need to express themselves. In October 2013, ICANN, the organization that sets domain name standards like “.com” and “.org,” created four new suffixes: شبكة, онлайн, сайт, 游戏. [Dan Kedmey of