为什么网址大部分都是英文的？

Why are Web addresses in English?

为什么网址都是英文?

The short answer: Web addresses are in English because the people who developed the standards for Web addresses were, for the most part, English-speaking Americans.

简短一点的答案如下：因为开发互联网标准的，大部分都是讲英文的美国人。

The longer answer: In the earliest days of the Internet, the only way to connect with a remote computer was to provide its unique IP address, a long string of digits such as 165.254.202.218. But in 1983, as the number of computers on the network continued to grow, the University of Wisconsin developed the Domain Name System (DNS), which maps numeric IP addresses to more easily remembered domain names like howstuffworks.com.

但更为详尽一点的答案是: 在互联网诞生之初, 与远程计算机连接的唯一途径是其唯一的IP 地址,也就是一长串数字,如165.254.202.218。但是到了1983年, 随着计算机数量的持续增长, 威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校开发了域名系统(DNS)。该系统将数字IP地址映射到了人们更容易记住的域名,

In 1990, British scientist (and English speaker) Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and by 1992, more than one million computers were connected, most of them in the United States [source: Computer History Museum]. In 1994, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a standards organization made up of representatives from several U.S. government agencies, published a set of standards for Web addresses, which it called Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs [sources: Berners-Lee, Internet Society, Ishida].

1990年, 英国科学家(当然也是以英语为母语了)蒂姆 · 伯纳斯-李发明了万维网。到1992年, 已有超过一百万台计算机实现互联,其中大部分计算机都在美国。在1994年的时候, 几个由美国政府机构代表组成的一个标准组织——国际互联网工程任务组(IETF)发布了一系列的网址标准, 并称之为统一资源定位器, 即我们现在所熟知的URL。

To make Web addresses easy to read, write, type and remember, the IETF restricted URLs to a small number of characters, namely the uppercase and lowercase letters of the English (or Latin) alphabet, the digits 0 through 9 and a few symbols [source: Berners-Lee]. The allowable characters are based on the American Standard Code for Information Exchange, better known as the US-ASCII character set, which was developed in the United States and first published in 1963.

为了方便网址的读写与记忆, IETF规定，URL只能限制在较少的字符以内。这些字符由英文的大写字母和小写字母(或拉丁文)、数字0到9和一些符号组成。这些字符都是以美国信息交换标准代码为基础的,也就是美国ASCII字符集。该字符集是在美国开发的,并于1963年首次出版。

This all worked out fine for English-speaking countries, but as of 2009, more than half of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide spoke a language with a character set other than the English (or Latin) alphabet [source: Whitney]. To understand what using the Web is like for those individuals, imagine that you have to navigate the Web using only Arabic. The content on your favorite sites is still in English, but the Web address for every site you use is made up of completely unfamiliar characters that may not even be found on your keyboard [source: Ishida]. That scenario, in reverse, is essentially what the Internet experience has been like for Web users who read and write using not only another language, but an entirely different alphabet or set of characters. (Visit a website like Egypt's el-balad.com, for example, and the distinction between the site content, which is entirely in Arabic, and the Web address, which uses only English characters, becomes immediately clear.)

这一切对英语国家来说都很友好, 但截至2009年, 全世界16亿互联网用户中有超过一半的人使用了除英语(或拉丁语)字母以外的另一种基于不同字符集的语言。如果你想体验一下这是什么感觉，不妨想象一下你必须用阿拉伯语来定位并浏览网页。虽然你最喜欢的网站上的内容仍然是英文的, 但是你的访问过的每一个网站的网址都是由完全陌生的字符组成的, 甚至还可能你在键盘上根本找不到这些字符。相反，对于那些不用英文甚至用的字符集也与一般人完全不同的用户来说，体验就是如此(比如你要访问埃及的 el-balad.com 这样的网站,它的网站内容与网址使用的语言有所区别。虽然内容完全是拉丁文，但网址还是英文——这样一切都变的清晰明白起来)。

Given the growing number of non-English users online, it may come as no surprise that English Web addresses are no longer the law of the land. In 2009, ICANN, the U.S.-based nonprofit organization that regulates domain names on the Internet, approved the use of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), meaning that Web addresses would be able to contain non-English characters like Chinese, Korean, Arabic or Cyrillic script [sources: Arthur, ICANN].

而现在，鉴于网上非英语用户的数量不断增加, 如果有一天英文网址表示法不再是这个领域的唯一标准，我们应该也不会感到那么意外了。2009年,ICANN(美国一个负责管理域名的非盈利组织)批准使用国际化域名, 这意味着网址将能够包含非英文字符了, 如中文、韩文、阿拉伯文或西里尔字母，都有可能。