Over 70% of the world's scientific research is now recorded in English and science accounts for the fastest growing area of the already immense English vocabulary. This programme travels from Xerox Parc in Silicon Valley to Electronics City in Bangalore, to explore the way that technological advance and English have become inextricably linked. New media and the Internet have produced a boom in English, but will this ubiquity continue? Will the development of translation machines make the need for a common language obsolete and, as more and more people grow up bi-lingual, will the monolingual English speakers be left behind?

Future also features Xerox Parc, Infosys, British Telecom's research centre at Adastral Park, digital libraries, Oxford English Dictionary, South Africa's multi-lingual soap opera Isidingo and the Welsh Language Board.

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