HK well-placed to provide Chinese support for Internet

September 16, 1998

The Government fully recognises the importance of providing Chinese language support for the development of applications and content on the Internet.

This was stated by the Secretary for Information Technology and Broadcasting, Mr K C Kwong, when addressing the opening ceremony of Asian IT Expo '98 this (Wednesday) morning.

Mr Kwong said, "The development of content on the Internet is changing rapidly as its use spreads round the globe. In Asia, in particular, there is a growing demand for Chinese content on the Internet.

"Hong Kong, as a bilingual city, is well placed to provide Chinese language support for the development of applications and content for this purpose," he said.

Mr Kwong pointed out that the Government fully recognised this and has taken measures to promote the use of Chinese. He said, "Within the Government, we have adopted a common Chinese character set to facilitate data exchange between government departments and the public.

"And, nearly all of our web sites now support both Chinese and English languages. Our current plan to deliver public services electronically, through the Internet and other communication channels, will also be enabled for communication in Chinese.

"We are also working closely with other governments and institutions under the aegis of the International Standards Organisation in the development of the ISO 10646 standard, which is an international coding standard aimed at encompassing characters of Asian languages into one single common character set," he added.

Mr Kwong noted that harmonisation of internal codes for Chinese characters was not enough. Equally important issues that demanded immediate attention included the provision of more sophisticated and user-friendly conversion tools capable of supporting the use of traditional and simplified Chinese characters; the development of an efficient and effective mechanism for searching and retrieving information in either traditional and simplified Chinese characters on the Internet; and above all the provision of content in Chinese.

All the above require close collaboration between Government, the information technology and services industry and academia. He was glad to see that everyone was pulling in the same direction.

- END -