Every so often new words must be created and popularized in order to describe new technology, practices, processes, ideas and beliefs. Never has it been more true than the last few decades, wherein lasers, blogging and googling, to name a recognizable few, have entered the lexicon.
Where this gets interesting is how these new words translate in the modern, profoundly interconnected world we live in. For simplicity lets consider only new words that originated in English; such as "internet" or "blueray". The terms quite frequently maintain their pronunciation in most other languages (as much as the new host allows, at least). "Internet", and many other new words are the same sound signifying the same thing in, perhaps, a dozen languages; many of which have few other meaningful similarities.
There are exceptions for a variety of reasons; sometimes the word is understood and instantly translated; the "internet" goes by the word for "web" or "net" used to denote fishing or storage tools in some languages, which is quite sensible. The worst exception are those attempted creations by entities such as the French Academy. They try to create new words within the language rather than use the word as it sounds in another language (for the words walkman, software and email, the academy has suggested baladeur, logiciel, and courriel respectively). This is done to prevent the Anglicization of the French language - something that is apparently perceived as a cultural atrocity of sorts.
This practice (and those similarly inspired) are simultaneously silly and counterproductive.
The idea of linguistic purity is academic, and a profoundly pedantic concept at that. It is at most a purely aesthetic preference; true it may make the language slightly more uniform; it may eliminate a few grammatical exceptions. But these concerns are those of linguists, not the mass of humanity, and even if they should be perfectly executed would do precious little for the average user of the language.
It is impractical because language is very rarely "manufactured" in this way; words take hold and gain popularity quite naturally and effectively on their own, not as a result of inventions by a language-governing-body. Indeed, the use of the Academy's terms relative to the "English" versions is often very low.
Finally and most crucially this practice is harmful in that it unnecessarily strengthens language barriers. Quite simply, consider if the entire world used very nearly the same word for the same thing. Communication across languages can be accomplished much more successfully and rapidly when the drudgery of memorizing and translating the names of objects can be skipped.
Not every word need or ought to be uniform, of course, there is no danger of that, and no uniformity of structure whatsoever would necessarily result. But for common physical objects, and most especially anything technical in nature, uniformity of name would greatly facilitate communication. (I would accuse those that fear a global language arising from such a practice to be both ignorant of the processes by which language tends to form and of being profoundly unimaginative with regards to the implications of such a thing coming to be).
The first and most important purpose of language is communication, and this practice hinders that, and in a potentially serious way: these are very commonly used words.
Has the English language suffered terribly as a result of rampant Latinization and Greekization [this word is actually in a real dictionary - no shit]? On the contrary, I would suggest that its extremely modular and encompassing nature is one of the greatest strengths.
