Internet Domains Go Multilingual Finally, Korean URLs Byron Alley
Register.com has partnered with i-DNS.net to provide domain names in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The system, also used by Network Solutions, uses a domain forwarding method to translated the native language domain name into its English equivalent. This could prove to be invaluable for the growing international Internet community. Originally, the Internet was designed only for the US, hence the support only for English.
The new system by i-DNS.net will also support languages such as Russian and Arabic--55 languages in total.
While Web pages can include text in virtually any language now, because of the Internet's primary development within the U.S. the addresses used to find specific pages have been limited to numbers and Roman characters. i-DNS.net currently allows the registration of Internet domain names in other languages through a "translation"/forwarding technology that recognizes a non-English address request and then forwards it to the original Roman-character URL. A company might have a URL of "www.mycompany.com", for example, but could also register the name in Japanese, so that when the appropriate Japanese Kangi were typed into a Web browser (so long as it's dialed in to a Japanese Internet Service Provider) the company's Web site would be called up.
