The era of online domination by the Roman alphabet will come one step closer to its end next year when a new top-level domain for China, .中国, is deployed. Xinhua reports that ICANN expects the domain, which uses the two-character modern Chinese word for "China," will be ready in 2009.
The report also notes that people will be able to use Chinese characters for their mailbox name (the part before the @ sign) as well.
In the future, Internet users (will be able to) use their native languages as mailbox names to send and receive e-mail, which means (the) English-dominant (Roman characters only) era which began in 1982 is about to end.
I hope the encodings will be flexible enough to communicate across deployments of Chinese characters. If someone writes a name in simplified characters and then someone whose computer can only type traditional needs to write an e-mail, this could get challenging.
Google is slated to release a robust Chinese-English dictionary featuring 13 dictionaries in collaboration with Kingsoft, a producer of PC-based dictionaries, according to a Chinese blog that I will inadequately translate as "Dances With Google."
The new product will drop Thursday at 2:30 a.m. China time, according to the blog. It will include such things as menu items, which are often perilously mistranslated into English.
The inventor of the increasingly ubiquitous Pleco Chinese-English dictionary software for Palm and Windows Mobile devices said the company is "very seriously considering developing" an iPhone version.
In an interview in April's China International Business (not yet online), Michael Love tells of developing the 6-year-old product and how it's getting popular enough that many foreigners in China are buying PDAs or PDA phones just to use Pleco.
I, for one, would not have bought my Windows Mobile-running HTC Touch if not for this program, and untold dozens of my Beijing friends and acquaintances are carrying around Treos for the same reason. (Love said he switches between a Treo 680 and an HTC Touch, himself.)
Here's what Love had to say about the iPhone prospects:
We're not thrilled about Apple locking down distribution and charging developers a 30 percent commission to sell iPhone software, but we really like the platform and think it has enough potential to be worth the hefty fees.
The iPod Touch is actually more exciting to us, in some respects, than the iPhone, since it doesn't force you to change your cell phone carrier and can be found almost anywhere.
It's next to impossible to buy a cell phone-less Palm or Windows Mobile handheld in many parts of the world nowadays, but the iPod Touch is all over the place, so for those people who are willing to buy a handheld just to run Pleco, it would be a better option than they've had in quite a while.
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