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This statements makes no sense to me either.

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.

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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.

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