Letters

People will be able to surf across languages for health data on the Internet

Language barriers serve to block the globalisation of health information resources. Although English is widely used in science, not everyone can communicate well in English. Much useful information in web sites on the Internet is in languages other than English. Only a few home pages that are in languages other than English provide abstracts in English. This restricts the sharing of information worldwide.

To help globalise health information further we are setting up a multilingual home page for the global health network (http://www.pitt.edu/HOME/GHNet/GHNet.html) on the Internet.^{1 2} The first step is to translate the English version into other languages so that more researchers and practitioners can use the home page in their mother tongue (a Japanese version is at http://www.pitt.edu/HOME/GHNet/GHNet-j.html). The second step is to build a home page dealing with health information available from countries where the home page is not in English. The third step will be to put a short description about the site, in English, into each foreign language site along with the email address of a person in charge of the site who can communicate in English. That person will serve as a contact when English speaking people access the site. Finally, we will either include computer assisted translation software among our site services or link our site to others providing such services. Such software now can provide a rough but usable translation, and its quality will improve in the coming years.

In this way, more data and findings from many countries will become available to researchers and practitioners worldwide. It will then be possible to surf across languages on home pages on the Internet.

Fellow, department of epidemiology Fellow, department of epidemiology Fellow Professor, department of epidemiology University of Pittsburgh, Diabetes Research Center, 3460 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

Senior public health specialist World Bank, 1818 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20433, USA

Akira Sekikawa, Ingrid Libman, Lucia Iochida, Ronald E Laporte, Eugene Boostrom 

1. Global Health Network Task Force. Towards a global health network. Current Issues in Public Health 1995;1:160-4.
2. LaPorte RE, Akazawa S, Boostrom E, Campos M, Gamboa C, Gooch T, et al. Global public health and the information superhighway. BMJ 1994;309:737. [Free Full Text]