ICANN tests domains fully written in 11 non english languages

This week ICANN - Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers - launched a major upgrade to its system - for the first time in its history. The test involves domain names fully written in 11 non-English languages.

For a while now, users have been able to purchase and use names half written in a foreign language - [Arabic].com, or [Chinese].com which amounted to users using a non english alphabet for half the name and then reverting to the .com or .org or similar for the other part of the domain name.

ICANN has endured quite a bit of criticism from non English speaking users as this use of domain names has been quite difficult for many of them. Just  imagine yourself having to write half a domain name in chinese and half in english… the frustration is understandable.

So, for the purpose of this test, ICANN has added a new top-level domain .test in Arabic, Persian, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese, Tamil and two flavors of Chinese to the DNS’s root servers.

On Monday, 09 October 2007, users were invited to test and report on the domain name "example.test" completely written in one of the languages mentioned above.

ICANN is looking for responses from users on the way the domain displays in the browser, whether there are any complications and whether the browser displays exactly what the users typed in.

The DNS infrastructure itself has remained unchanged, as the international domain name standard is implemented at the endpoint. Browsers such as Firefox and Internet explorer translate the foreign language names into ASCII string starting with xn-- before passing them to the nearest DNS.

If all tests go well, applications for domain names completely written in one of the languages above should start sometime next year.