FYI UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
5E
Cyberspace goes multilingual
Monday, August 19, 1996
Spanish-speaking soccer fans topple English-only rule in on-line forums
The Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO — America Online, the nation's largest online service, reversed a week-old English-only rule in a soccer discussion forum after angry Spanish-speaking subscribers called it racist and threatened to cancel.
Many of the forum's regulars hail from countries where soccer verges on a religion, and they flooded AOL with irate e-mail messages complaining that their Spanish postings were being deleted as quickly as they wrote them.
"AOL's supposed to let you communicate with the world, but we can't talk about our teams?" said Marcelo Rossetti, a Burlingame, Calif., graphic designer who led the protest.
"It's a victory for people who have fought for their rights to be upheld," said Salvador Sahagun, a restaurant owner from Santa Rosa, Calif., who joined the protest. "If they don't want our business, we can always go elsewhere."
AOL issued a public apology and a note that AOL now encourages members to post multilingual messages.
The rule, which took effect July 17, came about because America
"It's a victory for people who have fought for their rights to be upheld."
Salvador Sehagun
Santa Rosa, Calif.
restaurant owner
Online strives to maintain a G-rating for all its public areas — which requires being able to understand what's been written.
None of the volunteers who monitored the forum for offensive
sratements spoke the language.
"We couldn't read the postings in Spanish or Portuguese," said AOL representative Cathy Johnson.
Although English is the unofficial language of cyberspace, the use of other languages is growing as more people from around the world get online.
And with Spanish speakers making up more than 6 percent of the U.S. population, they are a market that even AOL is well aware of — despite the flap.
It already sponsors a Hispanic Online forum in which all monitors are bilingual and Spanish postings are encouraged, Johnson said.
"We're listening to our members and trying to be responsive to their needs," Johnson said.
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