Whenever you get close to constructing the Universal Language, God pulls the rug out from under you. For years, various translation programs have been mangling human thought in many different languages. Last week, Alta Vista's new program looked to be the nearing the goal of a widely applicable interpreter (in a testament to the durability of geekdom, the program took the Douglas Adams phrase "babelfish" in its title) - the first translation program whose results actually make a fairly decent translation of the original text. But for the past four days, the program's site has been unreachable - apparently a substantial portion of the 11 or 12 people on the web really aren't English speakers, and they have swamped the site in a biblical deluge of hits.

Too bad for me. My original plan was to translate this essay into German and then back into English, thus guaranteeing big laffs at the language gaffes. If you do manage to raise Alta Vista's translator (apparently provided by Systran), you can do it yourself; just by entering the URL, you can get the whole page back, in your choice of French, German, Portuguese, Italian or Spanish.

Of course, even if I had succeeded with my wacky translation master plan, you would have read through whatever unintentional infelicities cropped up, and still understood the article. Which is the whole point. In school, the nuns used to tell us that English was the hardest language in the world to learn. Now we all know nuns live fairly sheltered lives, but is it possible that they had never heard of Chinese or Arabic? Maybe, maybe you could make a case that French is less idiosyncratic, or Spanish is more grammatically simple, or that English spelling, grammar and pronunciation are counterintuitive; but what language is more accepting of variant usages than ours? (and this applies in both spoken and proper English - I imagine you getting upset about the fused participle; or maybe not).

Malleability is at least part of the reason English became the de facto world language (though inventing the atom bomb probably helped), and part of the reason that, just as translation programs promise to make more information accessible to a multilingual audience, they are at the same time extending the hegemony of English. Nobody cares if you don't speak proper English, and now we have another reason not to bother learning anybody else's language. Foreign slang from "OK" to "wasta" to "gung ho" gets immediately melted into the whole, until these words begin to seem like homespun coinages. If English is in some ways an inferior instrument, it is the Microsoft of languages, absorbing everything that comes in its path, until nothing remains.

Literally, maybe. If linguists are to be believed, the planet's 6,500 languages are dying off at a rate of one every two weeks. But most of these languages would be dying out even without the spread of English, and feeble attempts by France's Immortals to stop the English juggernaut won't save anybody's culture. Whatever pockets of the world haven't already been made safe for English are being mopped up (as speech recognition capabilities expand, we can look forward to translators even for languages that don't use the Roman alphabet).

Of course, God will have to punish us before we completely take over the world. America's about due for some wailing and gnashing of teeth as it is.