Sites’ E-Mail Help Bridge Language Gap On The Internet

Log on to everymail.com and it looks like any other free e-mail service site. But with a click of the mouse, everymail.com will allow you compose your electronic epistle in 28 languages, including Urdu, Vietnamese and Icelandic.

Log on to everychat.com, and it’s a linguist’s delight. Messages are posted in Hebrew, Thai and Russian.

“The old premise that you have to speak and write in English to get on the Net is dead and gone,” said Umair Khan, the CEO of eGlyphs Inc., which launched everymail.com and everychat.com on Nov. 19. Though the sites are still in beta testing and are only compatible with Windows operating systems, both have attracted more than 100,000 users in only three weeks.

As the World Wide Web begins to live up to its name, more companies are bridging the communication gap on the Internet. Big portal sites hoping to attract more international users and advertising revenues have expanded into Asia, Europe and South America, complete with Web sites written in Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese. Smaller sites like Vietmedia.com are also vying for their ethnic niche of the market.

Online media analysts such as Jordan Rohan of Wit Capital said companies like eGlyphs provide the infrastructure to facilitate e-commerce. “You can imagine how difficult it is to buy products when the vast majority of all e-commerce sites are in English,” said Rohan. “So there are huge opportunities to use technology to broaden the geographical and international scope of e-commerce.”

For Jun Wang, a Chinese programmer who’s lived and worked in the United States for eight years, e-mail is a convenient way to stay in touch with friends and family. Though she’s willing to read her Chinese language e-mails, when she dispatches one she prefers to type in English. Wang said Chinese language software is too time-consuming to use in everyday e-mail exchanges.

“Since most of my friends in China understand English, I find it’s just easier to send them e-mail in English,” she said.

Communicating on the Internet in a language other than English is long overdue, said Khan, who first patched together a rudimentary Urdu alphabet in 1997 to send e-mails to friends and family in his native Pakistan.

“The Internet was about meeting people, but that’s been passed over for e-commerce and B-to-B (business-to-business) ventures,” Khan said. “eGlyphs is the next step that hasn’t been taken in the last five years.”

eGlyphs has mapped out characters of 28 languages onto a typical PC keyboard. The company plans to have a total of 45 alphabets in all. More complex character-based alphabets like Chinese will debut on the lunar new year, Feb. 5, 2000.

Though Yahoo’s e-mail service and Microsoft’s Hotmail have the capability of receiving e-mails in different languages, reading and composing e-mails often depends on downloading or installing special language software on a PC. In some instances, a special keyboard is required. eGlyphs’s applications are Web-based, with no cumbersome software to install, Khan said.

In a rag-tag Fremont office typical of a low-budget start-up, Khan and his engineers rig the slowest modems they can find to test out their product.

“We want to know how it feels to log in from India with a 28.8K modem,” said Khan, who wants to save time for users in developing countries. “There’s no concept of broadband there.”

Khan, who left Pakistan to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988, made news in Pakistani newspapers and television when word spread on newsgroups that Khan had developed a way to communicate in Urdu over the Net.

Though Khan is pleased that eGlyphs has the potential to become a virtual United Nations, the CEO in him believes there’s money to be made in the venture. Khan left Intel and “the ultimate Dilbert existence” this summer to start Clickmarks.com, a bookmark site. Khan tried to integrate some language capabilities into Clickmarks.com and investors quickly saw the potential for a spinoff. R.B. Webber quickly invested $800,000 in eGlyphs, which still shares some of its seven programmers with Clickmarks.

Khan said he knows of no direct competitors but translation sites like Babelfish.com and Elingual.com are indirect competitors. Specialized language software like UnionWay and AsiaSurf are also considered competitors.