For many years the BBC World Service, available all over the globe on the radio, was a lifeline for expatriate Britons - somewhere to hear the cricket no matter where they were.
Its news service has also been a trusted global voice for many people who have never come near Britain, with its huge international reach. Now the BBC World Service is highlighting its online news services, which can now be accessed via the Internet in more than 40 languages.
The news and other programming broadcast on BBC World Service radio is available in Real Audio on the web at www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice. A total of 43 languages are now online in audio, including Hindi, Urdu and Bengali.
Multimedia sites with text, audio and video, updated 24 hours a day, are available in English, Arabic, Chinese, Russian and, most recently, Spanish. Similar sites in Urdu, Hindi, Indonesian and Portuguese are planned. The director of BBC World Service, Mark Byford, spoke in Belfast last week. "Use of World Service online is now at record levels, with more than 40 million pages-views a month," he said. "And the BBC World Service is the most accessed audio news on the Internet."
Byford emphasised the benefits of the service to people in countries where their first language isn't spoken. "The Internet means that you don't have to live in a particular country to hear news from the World Service in your own language. Speakers in a huge range of languages can now access news from the BBC World Service wherever they live." The World Service was awarded an extra £64 million by the British government last year, some to be spent on its online services.
RTE radio's more modest contribution to multicultural programming is Radio One World. Broadcasting on the mediumwave frequencies of 2FM (612 khz and 1278 khz), from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. every weeknight, the programme is both multicultural and multilingual, and plays music from around the world as well as news and features relevant to the ethnic and immigrant communities in Ireland. Recently Radio One World expanded its team of reporters - Algerian, Kurdish, Bosnian, Nigerian, Tanzanian and Russian. The programme is anchored from RTE's Cork studios by Marcus Connaughton and Paulina Chiwangu, and now from Dublin by Cherif Labreche.
