How to create an international e-business
The World Domain
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will look to roll out its Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) project in late 2009. ICANN’s senior director for IDN Tina Dam says it would mean internet users could have any web address or email address in any language.
Exporters could therefore buy domains in the language of their destination market. “They could select the different alphabets that they wanted to have, different addresses for that website depending on the languages they want to represent, what market they want to target,” says Dam.
This would help exporters who want to reach their market in a non-Latin-based language if they advertised an internet address, particularly in print media. Dam gives the example of a Russian newspaper carrying an advertisement for a Russian website, which would currently carry a URL in Latin characters—difficult for the reader to visit if they did not have a keyboard with Latin characters.
IDNs wouldn’t just change things for languages with a different character set, but sometimes the whole orientation of typing, she explains: “In Arabic you type from right to left so you type in part of the address in Arabic right to left; can you imagine switching to typing the second part of that address in Latin from left to right?”
The domain must only contain the alphabet from one character set to avoid confusion with similar looking language script.
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