It would be nice to see what he means with 'Chinese content will dominate the web', does he mean that in terms of importance or in terms of volume (or both) ?
If Chinese starts to dominate, I'd expect to see great strides in automated translation research here in America. Us Americans are freaked out by the prospect of a world that doesn't speak English.
Perhaps the translation services will arise out of our desire to communicate and converse with more people, not out of fear. It's an opportunity, not a threat.
As a side note, the desire to think that others act from fear really oversimplifies a lot of social behavior.
Good point, I do not either what he meant. I think importance would be difficult to measure, but volume growth would be easy for Google to do.
I imagine that Schmidt is not talking blindly, he has access to the growth rates of content and the forecast may be accurate.
Perhaps there was a good chance that a lot of Chinese business leaders were at that conference, so he is just tailoring his remarks. Without context, you can't really extract meaning.
I'm not going to learn chinese; you neither, for most values of you. So we'd still have our web for a small group of maybe one billion english-speaking (FSVO) users. Maybe there would be more content in Chinese, but we will never know because we won't bother to read it unless they translate, to ENGLISH.
If Schmidt is expecting machine translation to significantly improve, it makes perfect sense.
You wouldn't need to learn Chinese for it to impact you. You'd just start getting more and more readably-chinglish results as you search. And if translation services work well-enough each way, it would have an unavoidable impact on products/services angling toward Chinese interests.
