The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has started live testing of Internationalized Domain Names in 11 languages, Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil.

Currently, the domain names have to have the portion after the dot (e.g. "com", "biz" etc) in Latin characters. However, with the eventual introduction of the Internationalized Domain Names, Internet users will be able to type the whole domain name in their language.

“This is one of the most exciting times yet in the development of IDNs,” said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO. “Internet users who speak the 11 languages of the test can play a key role in testing how IDNs operate, and help us move toward full implementation for all the languages of the world.”

The actual test consists of 11 wiki pages can be accessed by typing example.test in the characters of either one of the above-mentioned 11 languages. Users can create subpages of their choice to test the IDNs, for example using their names in their native languages.

“These wikipages are key to the test. We want to know how the URL displays in the Internet browser, if it works when you cut and paste it into the body of an email to a friend, and how all of this impacts the root zone,” Dr Twomey added.

The way IDN works is it actually converts the non-ASCII characters to ASCII-form, in order to preserve compatibility with the existing DNS and name resolver infrastructure.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was created in 1998 in order to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. Government by other organizations such as IANA. ICANN essentially manages domain names and IP addresses and establishes Internet policies, among other tasks.

Access the ICANN announcement here:
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-15oct07.htm

And the Wiki pages here:
http://idn.icann.org/