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Show 180 charles h. monson prize winner spring 2012 Laurel Baeder The questions we begin to explore are related to a new phenomenon on the internet, internationalized domain names (IDNs), or web addresses in native character sets other than our familiar roman alphabet. These new domains are crucial to web development especially among language groups who traditionally have not had a significant web presence such as Arabic or Russian. This research examines the effect these IDNs have on the language content and layout of e-commerce web pages, and how they compare to their English based counterparts that currently dominate the web. To understand these new websites we as-sembled a collection of examples across our three focus languages, Arabic, Chinese and Russian. We then analyzed these websites based on their layout and presentation. Early conclusions show that English involvement in these pages differs frequently by the native language. For example, a Chinese website is more likely to feature English content than a Russian site, or Chinese site is likely to offer a link for English translation, where the translated page uses a very different layout or im-age/ color scheme. Supporting research that shows that web users expect websites to be laid out different-ly depending on the user's native country and language. Usually key items such as a search bar or help link are expected to appear in different parts of the page based on different regions of the world. These differ-ences are minimal. We hypothesize that because of the long history of the web as an "English-only" frontier and the ease of access to all language websites worldwide, these IDNs will more and more resemble their English counterparts that have set the a precedent for e-commerce websites and marketing online. WWW.ENGL.ISH: THE EFFECT OF INTERNATIONALIZED DOMAIN NAMES ON WEB CONTENT AND DESIGN Laurel Baeder (Jay Jordan) Department of English University of Utah Jay Jordan |