IN the early years of the Web, nearly all of its content appeared in English. But that is changing quickly. Today, articles on Wikipedia are available in more than 200 languages, for example. And about 36 percent of the seven million blogs running on WordPress, a free software platform, are in languages other than English, according to the founder Matt Mullenweg. Such changes create a challenge, says Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. “We are all experiencing a smaller Internet than we should be,” he said. “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 services, automated and human, are helping to translate what Mr. Zuckerman calls “the polyglot Internet.” Once-expensive machine translation technology is now available free at sites like Google Translate, which offers translations in 41 languages. At these sites, users can input a block of text, and a machine-generated translation pops up almost instantaneously. Read rest of article : http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/business/17proto.html