New Languages Added to ICANN’s IDN Wiki: Hebrew, Amharic

[rofsjan]

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New Languages Added to ICANN’s IDN Wiki

Hebrew, Amharic speakers now have pages on Internationalized Domain Names evaluation site

19 March 2008

MARINA DEL REY, Calif.: Hebrew and Amharic speakers now have dedicated wiki pages to share their experiences as a part of the global evaluation of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) being done by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

"Since its launch in October 2007, the IDN wiki has helped ICANN and the Internet community look at exactly how IDNs operate in the root, and how different software handles domain names in characters from different scripts," said Tina Dam, ICANN’s IDN Program Director. "We’re hoping that Internet users who understand Hebrew and Amharic will access these wiki pages and share their experiences."

The IDN wiki was initially based on 11 example.test domains in Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. The wiki allows Internet users to establish their own subpages with their own names in their own language such as example.test/yourname.

Though the new languages will not be used for translations of example.test in the Internet’s root, they will be used at the fourth level (after the top level “org”, the second level “icann”, and the third level “idn”) so users can have dedicated wiki pages. These language extensions to the wiki are available at http://am.idn.icann.org and http://he.idn.icann.org.

As well, with the Hebrew addition, since there is a .test TLD label in Hebrew script, an additional address has been assigned in the Hebrew language — [ http://xn--6dbbec0c.xn--deba0ad/%D7%...90%D7%A9%D7%99 ]. (If this link doesn’t work in your browser, you can access an embedded link at http://idn.icann.org/Hebrew_script.)

"We have been able to add these languages to the wiki because of interest from the community and the availability of a volunteer moderator fluent in the language to spend time with the wiki support team to localize the language area and work with users," added Dam. "Anyone interested in adding new languages can contact me directly at tina.dam@icann.org."
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