Hablando del Internet
This entry is part of a list of articles I wrote for a newsletter encouraging bilingual employees to embrace their knowledge of speaking Spanish. I found the articles while going through my old files, so I wanted to share them in this format.
Does it seem to you that there are hardly any terms in Spanish for the Internet? To attempt an answer, we have to review a brief history of the Internet.
Have you ever wondered how the whole World Wide Web got started? The small space in this newsletter is not enough room to discuss the history of the Internet. [Update: The Internet Society has a list of documents that discuss the histories here.] But, to get a brief, very general idea, here is a tip of the iceberg of the events.
In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the first man-made, artificial, earth satellite. This was a first for global communications. Not to be outdone, then-president Eisenhower ordered the creation of agencies for the U.S. to advance technologies in space, weapons, and communication.
In 1958, the United States formed ARPA (now DARPA, Defense Advance Research Project Agency) and NASA (National Aeronautics and
Space Administration). As the years passed, ARPA created and tested several methods of communication. The systems improved with each passing year.
By 1971, it was possible to send electronic messages over an established interconnected network of servers. In 1972, the @ symbol was used to differentiate the receiver (user) from the server or level (network): user@server.second.net. The modern e-mail was born.
Eventually, browsers and their program language HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) were develop. Advances continue to this day.
Since the idea for the Internet surfaced in the United States, most of the basic terminology is and remains in English. As the globalization of the Internet occurs and ownership of this “cyberspace” expands, each culture begins to adopt the terms in their own language.
Browsers, ISPs, and e-mail programs now come in almost any language you want to use. As these changes take place, familiarize yourself with some of the frequent terms and phrases.
Some of the pages you may have visited recently offer a Spanish counterpart. For example, MSN offers a Latino counterpart in Spanish at http://latino.msn.com/. Yahoo! has http://espanol.yahoo.com/. In your leisure time, explore the Internet to enhance your Spanish experience.
Tags: bilingual, English, history, Internet, Latino, Spanish