rnet wherever they may be, for
whom a given language is their native language. Thus, the Spanish Language
nation includes not only Spanish and Latin American users, but millions of
Hispanic users in the US, as well as odd places like Spanish-speaking Morocco.

Language Transparency: We are rapidly reaching the point where highly accurate
machine translation of text and speech will be so common as to be embedded in
computer platforms, and even in chips in various ways. At that point, and as the
growth of the Web slows, the accuracy of language translation hits 98% plus, and
the saturation of language pairs has covered the vast majority of the market,
language transparency (any-language-to-any-language communication) will be too
limiting a vision for those selling this technology. The next development will
be 'transcultural, transnational transparency', in which other aspects of human
communication, commerce and transactions beyond language alone will come into
play. For example, gesture has meaning, facial movement has meaning and this
varies among societies. The thumb-index finger circle means 'OK' in the United
States. In Argentina, it is an obscene gesture.

When the inevitable growth of multi-media, multi-lingual videoconferencing comes
about, it will be necessary to 'visually edit' gestures on the fly. The MIT
Media Lab [MIT: Massachussets Institute of Technology], Microsoft and many
others are working on computer recognition of facial expressions, biometric
access identification via the face, etc. It won't be any good for a U.S.
business person to be making a great point in a Web-based multi-lingual video
conference to an Argentinian, having his words translated into perfect
Argentinian Spanish if he makes the 'O' gesture at the same time. Computers can
intercept this kind of thing and edit them on the fly.

There are thousands of ways in which cultures and countries differ, and most of
these are computerizable to change as one goes from one culture to the other.
They include laws, customs, business practices, ethics, currency conversions,
clothing size differences, metric versus English system differences, etc., etc.
Enterprising companies will be capturing and programming these differences and
selling products and services to help the peoples of the world communicate
better. Once this kind of thing is widespread, it will truly contribute to
international understanding."

Logos is an international company (US, Can