On A Friday: So You Think You Can Speak English?

Back in the days shortly after Australian Federation and until halfway through the 20th century, it was common banter for Aussies to describe the Australian people as “more British than the British.” Back then Australia was still strongly attached to the British Empire and the “more British” suggestion could be seen as a light-hearted joke at the expense of the mother country.

America on the other hand has not tried to carry on its British history since its revolution and independence in the 1700s. Many parts of American culture and values have changed to become unique to the US, but there are still quite a few remnants of British settlement. One of the most obvious of these is the English Language. I have in the past joked that American English is far from being “real” English, and now I now have some serious backing for that argument!

People around the world use American websites such as Google and its subsidiary YouTube to explore what the internet has to offer. Google delivers most of its websites and services in a plethora of languages, with its standard language being US English.

I signed in to YouTube last night to be greeted with a “Welcome to YouTube” message (despite having been a user for some time now). The message suggested setting my location filter to Australia and my language to English UK.

Happy with those suggestions I went to click Ok. But just as I went to do that I noticed a little hyperlink in the bottom left of the message box that read “Show message in English”.

I’m sorry Google, but where did the ENGLISH language originate from? No, not the region of New England, but from England in the United Kingdom!

Fundamentally these languages are the same but there are some critical differences. I spell colour, you spell color; I spell centre, you spell center. Describing US English as “English” is muddling the dialects and could be confusing for some people who are trying to learn the language.

Greater clarity is needed in these language message boxes to prevent such confusion, especially when automation goes wrong as it did in the above message. At least that way you won’t get people like myself being picky about your terminology!

Google’s Stand for Free Speech

The Implications of Google’s Actions in China on the Labor Government’s proposed internet Censorship.

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In a firm stand against the Chinese government’s human rights policies, Google yesterday announced that they will no longer provide the same search censoring service to China that they once did.

Google’s webmail service, Gmail, and several other internet services were subject to cyber attacks last month which Google have traced to China.

In a post on The Official Google Blog entitled “A new approach to China”, Google’s Chief Legal Officer David Drummond stated that “we [Google] have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn”.

Drummond continues to explain that Google will “discuss [how Google could run] an unfiltered search engine within the [Chinese] law, if at all.” This is backed up by a statement that Google “may well [have] to shut down Google.cn, and potentially [its] offices in China” if an agreement with the Government cannot be reached.

Drummond’s post indicates that the attacks were on the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, and that Google have a strong belief in human rights and freedom of information. He comments that when Google China was launched in 2006 it was intended to make uncensored information more easily available in China, and that Google had experienced “discomfort” in agreeing to censorship.

Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy announced in December of last year that he plans to put legislation which would censor Australia’s internet to parliament before next election.

The Australian system will be implemented as a blacklist targeting “refused classification” (RC) websites. RC websites contain material which is not allowed a rating in Australia due to illegal actions being portrayed. A report leaked last March however suggests that some websites possibly outside of the initial scope of RC content may also be blocked, including some pages on the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

What are the implications of this on Google’s service in Australia? If the search engine were to leave Australia it may cause greater public unrest than in China where Google is not such a dominant search engine.

Google’s stance on freedom of information may lead to some disputes on service with the Australian Government, however the ISP-level filtering forwarded by Senator Conroy may mean that filtered content found on Google will lead to a dead link and not the blocked website.

Google’s actions in China show how a large information carrier such as Google can attempt to hold an entire country’s Government at ransom.