Interviews (1998-2001)

by Marie Lebert

BRIAN KING

#Director of the WorldWide Language Institute, who initiated NetGlos (The
Multilingual Glossary of Internet Terminology)

One of the WorldWide Language Institute's projects is NetGlos (The Multilingual Glossary of Internet Terminology), which is currently being compiled from 1995 as a voluntary, collaborative project by a number of translators and other professionals. Versions for the following languages are being prepared: Chinese, Croatian, English, Dutch/Flemish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Maori, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

*Interview of September 15, 1998

= How did using the Internet change the life of your organization?

Our main service is providing language instruction via the Web. Our company is in the unique position of having come into existence because of the Internet!

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

Although English is still the most important language used on the Web, and the Internet in general, I believe that multilingualism is an inevitable part of the future direction of cyberspace.

Here are some of the important developments that I see as making a multilingual
Web become a reality:

1. Popularization of information technology

Computer technology has traditionally been the sole domain of a "techie" elite, fluent in both complex programming languages and in English — the universal language of science and technology. Computers were never designed to handle writing systems that couldn't be translated into ASCII (American standard code for information interchange). There wasn't much room for anything other than the 26 letters of the English alphabet in a coding system that originally couldn't even recognize acute accents and umlauts — not to mention nonalphabetic systems like Chinese.

But tradition has been turned upside down. Technology has been popularized. GUIs (graphical user interfaces) like Windows and Macintosh have hastened the process (and indeed it's no secret that it was Microsoft's marketing strategy to use their operating system to make computers easy to use for the average person). These days this ease of use has spread beyond the PC to the virtual, networked space of the Internet, so that now nonprogrammers can even insert Java applets into their webpages without understanding a single line of code.

2. Competition for a chunk of the "global market" by major industry players

An extension of (local) popularization is the export of information technology around the world. Popularization has now occurred on a global scale and English is no longer necessarily the lingua franca of the user. Perhaps there is no true lingua franca, but only the individual languages of the users. One thing is certain — it is no longer necessary to understand English to use a computer, nor it is necessary to have a degree in computer science.

A pull from non-English-speaking computer users and a push from technology companies competing for global markets has made localization a fast growing area in software and hardware development. This development has not been as fast as it could have been. The first step was for ASCII to become Extended ASCII. This meant that computers could begin to start recognizing the accents and symbols used in variants of the English alphabet — mostly used by European languages. But only one language could be displayed on a page at a time.

3. Technological developments

The most recent development is Unicode. Although still evolving and only just being incorporated into the latest software, this new coding system translates each character into 16 bytes. Whereas 8 byte Extended ASCII could only handle a maximum of 256 characters, Unicode can handle over 65,000 unique characters and therefore potentially accommodate all of the world's writing systems on the computer.

So now the tools are more or less in place. They are still not perfect, but at last we can at least surf the Web in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and numerous other languages that don't use the Western alphabet. As the Internet spreads to parts of the world where English is rarely used — such as China, for example, it is natural that Chinese, and not English, will be the preferred choice for interacting with it. For the majority of the users in China, their mother tongue will be the only choice.

There is a change-over period, of course. Much of the technical terminology on the Web is still not translated into other languages. And as we found with our Multilingual Glossary of Internet Terminology — known as NetGlos — the translation of these terms is not always a simple process. Before a new term becomes accepted as the "correct" one, there is a period of instability where a number of competing candidates are used. Often an English loanword becomes the starting point — and in many cases the endpoint. But eventually a winner emerges that becomes codified into published technical dictionaries as well as the everyday interactions of the nontechnical user. The latest version of NetGlos is the Russian one and it should be available in a couple of weeks or so (end of September 1998). It will no doubt be an excellent example of the ongoing, dynamic process of "russification" of Web terminology.

4. Linguistic democracy

Whereas "mother-tongue education" was deemed a human right for every child in the world by a Unesco report in the early '50s, "mother-tongue surfing" may very well be the Information Age equivalent. If the Internet is to truly become the global network that it is promoted as being, then all users, regardless of language background, should have access to it. To keep the Internet as the preserve of those who, by historical accident, practical necessity, or political privilege, happen to know English, is unfair to those who don't.

5. Electronic commerce

Although a multilingual Web may be desirable on moral and ethical grounds, such high ideals are not enough to make it other than a reality on a small-scale. As well as the appropriate technology being available so that the non-English speaker can go, there is the impact of "electronic commerce" as a major force that may make multilingualism the most natural path for cyberspace.

Sellers of products and services in the virtual global marketplace into which the Internet is developing must be prepared to deal with a virtual world that is just as multilingual as the physical world. If they want to be successful, they had better make sure they are speaking the languages of their customers!

= How do you see the future?

As a company that derives its very existence from the importance attached to languages, I believe the future will be an exciting and challenging one. But it will be impossible to be complacent about our successes and accomplishments. Technology is already changing at a frenetic pace. Life-long learning is a strategy that we all must use if we are to stay ahead and be competitive. This is a difficult enough task in an English-speaking environment. If we add in the complexities of interacting in a multilingual/multicultural cyberspace, then the task becomes even more demanding. As well as competition, there is also the necessity for cooperation — perhaps more so than ever before.

The seeds of cooperation across the Internet have certainly already been sown. Our NetGlos Project has depended on the goodwill of volunteer translators from Canada, U.S., Austria, Norway, Belgium, Israel, Portugal, Russia, Greece, Brazil, New Zealand and other countries. I think the hundreds of visitors we get coming to the NetGlos pages everyday is an excellent testimony to the success of these types of working relationships. I see the future depending even more on cooperative relationships — although not necessarily on a volunteer basis.

GEOFFREY KINGSCOTT (London)

#Co-editor of the online magazine Language Today

Geoffrey Kingscott is the managing director of Praetorius, a major British translation company and language consultancy, and one of the two editors of Language today, an online magazine for people working in applied languages: translators, interpreters, terminologists, lexicographers and technical writers.

*Interview of September 4, 1998

= What did using the Internet bring to your company?

The Internet has made comparatively little difference to our company. It is an additional medium rather than one which will replace all others.

We will continue to have a company website, and to publish a version of the magazine on the Web, but it will remain only one factor in our work. We do use the Internet as a source of information which we then distill for our readers, who would otherwise be faced with the biggest problem of the Web — undiscriminating floods of information.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

Because the salient characteristics of the Web are the multiplicity of site generators and the cheapness of message generation, as the Web matures it will in fact promote multilingualism. The fact that the Web originated in the USA means that it is still predominantly in English but this is only a temporary phenomenon. If I may explain this further, when we relied on the print and audiovisual (film, television, radio, video, cassettes) media, we had to depend on the information or entertainment we wanted to receive being brought to us by agents (publishers, television and radio stations, cassette and video producers) who have to subsist in a commercial world or — as in the case of public service broadcasting — under severe budgetary restraints. That means that the size of the customer-base is all-important, and determines the degree to which languages other than the ubiquitous English can be accommodated. These constraints disappear with the Web.

To give only a minor example from our own experience, we publish the print version of Language Today only in English, the common denominator of our readers. When we use an article which was originally in a language other than English, or report an interview which was conducted in a language other than English, we translate into English and publish only the English version. This is because the number of pages we can print is constrained, governed by our customer-base (advertisers and subscribers). But for our Web edition we also give the original version.

STEVEN KRAUWER (Utrecht, Netherlands)

#Coordinator of ELSNET (European Network of Excellence in Human Language
Technologies)

ELSNET (European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies) has 135 European academic and industrial institutions as members. The long-term technological goal which unites the participants of ELSNET is to build multilingual speech and NL (natural language) systems with unrestricted coverage of both spoken and written language. It is funded by the European Commission.

Steven Krauwer, coordinator of ELSNET, is a senior lecturer/researcher in Computational Linguistics at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS (Utrecht University, Netherlands). His main interests are: machine translation; evaluation of language and speech systems; integration of language, speech and other modalities.

*Interview of September 23, 1998

= How did using the Internet change your professional life?

It's my chief way of communicating with others and my main source of information. I'm sure I'll spend the rest of my professional life trying to use it to remove or at least lower the language barriers.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

As a European citizen, I think multilingualism on the Web is absolutely essential, because in the long run I don't think it's a healthy situation when only those who have a reasonable command of English can take full advantage of what the Web has to offer.

As a researcher (specialized in machine translation), I see multilingualism as a major challenge: how can we ensure that all information on the Web is accessible to everybody, irrespective of language differences.

*Interview of August 4, 1999

= What has happened since our first interview?

I've become more and more convinced we should be careful not to address the multilinguality problem in isolation. I've just returned from a wonderful summer vacation in France, and even if my knowledge of French is modest (to put it mildly), it's surprising to see that I still manage to communicate successfully by combining my poor French with gestures, facial expressions, visual clues and diagrams. I think the Web (as opposed to old-fashioned text-only email) offers excellent opportunities to exploit the fact that transmission of information via different channels (or modalities) can still work, even if the process is only partially successful for each of the channels in isolation.

= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?

The baseline is of course "thou shalt not steal, even if it's easy". It's interesting to note that, however complex it is to define legally, most people have very good intuition about what counts as stealing:

- if I copy info from the Web and use it for my own purposes, I'm not stealing, because this is exactly why the information was put on the Web in the first place;

- if I copy info from the Web and re-transmit it to others, giving credit to the author, I am not stealing;

- if I copy info from the Web and re-transmit it to others, pretending I'm the author, I am stealing;

- if I copy info from the Web and sell it to others without permission from the author, I am stealing.

I realize there are lots of borderline cases where it's not immediately clear what counts as stealing, but let's leave that to the lawyers to figure out.

= What practical solutions would you suggest?

I would adopt the following rules of thumb:

- copying info for your own use is always free;

- re-transmission is OK with proper credit to the author (unless the info is explicitely labeled as public);

- re-sale of info is OK with permission of the author (unless public).

To back this up one could envisage:

- introducing standard labels (for each mime type) which indicate whether the info is public, and if not, point to the author;

- making browsers "label-aware", so they can show the content of the label when displaying text, pictures and movies;

- adopting the convention/rule that info cannot be copied without the label;

- (a bit more adventurous) setting up an ISPN (international standard person number), similar to ISBN (international standard book number) and ISSN (international standard serial number), which identifies a person, so that references to authors in the labels are less dependent on changes in e-mail addresses and home pages (as long as people keep their addresses in the ISPN database up-to-date, of course).

= What practical solutions would you suggest for the growth of a multilingual
Web?

- At the author end: better education of web authors to use combinations of modalities to make communication more effective across language barriers (and not just for cosmetic reasons);

- at the server end: more translation facilities à la AltaVista (quality not impressive, but always better than nothing);

- at the browser end: more integrated translation facilities (especially for the smaller languages), and more quick integrated dictionary lookup facilities.

= What is your best experience with the Internet?

One night I heard on a foreign radio station a fragment of a song and the name of a person, and using only the Internet I was able to:

- identify the person as the composer;

- find the title of the song;

- confirm that this was actually the song I'd heard;

- discover that it was part of a musical;

- find the title of the CD-set of the musical;

- buy the CDs;

- find the website of the musical;

- find the country and place where the musical was still being performed, including when;

- find the phone number and opening hours of the booking office;

- get a map of the city, and directions to get to the theatre.

I could've done my hotel and flight bookings via the Internet too, but it wasn't necessary in this case.

The only thing I could not do was the actual booking, because they didn't accept
Internet bookings from abroad at the time, for security reasons.

I had a wonderful time at the theatre, and I don't think this would've been possible without the Internet!

= And your worst experience?

Nothing specific, but there are a few repetitive ones:

- unsolicited commercial e-mails;

- web pages full of ads;

- pages overloaded with irrelevant, time-consuming graphics;

- dead links.

*Interview of June 1st, 2001

= How much do you still work with paper?

I use paper a lot. All important documents are printed out, as they are a lot easier to consult on paper (easier to browse, never a dead battery). I don't think that this is going to change for quite a while.

= What do you think about e-books?

Still a long way to go before reading from a screen feels as comfortable as reading a book.

= What is your definition of cyberspace?

For me the cyberspace is the part of the universe (including people, machines and information) that I can reach from behind my desk.

= How would you define the information society?

An information society is a society:

- where most of the knowledge and information is no longer stored in people's brains or books but on electronic media,

- where the information repositories are distributed, interconnected via an information infrastructure, and accessible from anywhere, and

- where social processes have become so dependent on this information and the information infrastructure that citizens who are not connected to this information system cannot fully participate in the functioning of the society.

TIM McKENNA (Geneva)

#Thinks and writes about the complexity of truth in a world of flux

*Interview of October 17, 2000

= What exactly do you do professionally?

I am a mathematics teacher and currently I am taking time off to earn a master's degree in telecommunications management.

= What exactly do you do on the Internet?

I use the Internet primarily for research.

= How do you see the future?

I hope to see the Internet become more of a tool for accessing news and media that is not controlled by large corporate accounts.

= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?

Copyright is a difficult issue. The owner of the intellectual property thinks that she owns what she has created. I believe that the consumer purchases the piece of plastic (in the case of a CD) or the bounded pages (in the case of book). The business community has not found a new way to add value to intellectual property. Consumers don't think very abstractly. When they download songs for example they are simply listening to them, they are not possessing them. The music and publishing industry need to find ways to give consumers tactile vehicles for selling the intellectual property.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

When software gets good enough for people to chat or talk on the Web in real time in different languages, then we will see whole a new world appear before us. Scientists, political activists, businesses and many more groups will be able to communicate immediately without having to go through mediators or translators.

= How much do you still work with paper? Will there still be a place for paper in the future?

Paper still plays a vital role in my life. Reading is a matter of cultural pride
for me. My background is Irish (Tim is a US citizen). To paraphrase Thomas
Cahil, spirituality has always been closely connected with literacy in Ireland.
I would miss reading and reading from a screen is too burdensome to the eyes.

= What do you think about e-books?

I don't think that they have the right appeal for lovers of books. The Internet is great for information. Books are not information. People that love books have a relationship with their books. They reread them, write in them, confer with them. Just as cyber sex will never replace the love of a woman, e-books will never be a vehicle for beautiful prose.

= What do you suggest to give blind and partially-sighted people easier access to the Web?

Software companies need to develop voice activated software with the blind in mind when it comes to quality and the broad consumer market when it comes to profitabilty. It will never be profitable and affordable for the blind to have technology catered to them. However, there are countless examples of technologies that are developed with the less abled in mind and that have wide appeal with the masses.

= What is your definition of cyberspace?

Cyberspace to me is the distance that is bridged when individuals use technology to connect, either by sharing information or chatting. To say that one exists in cyberspace is really to say that he has eliminated distance as a barrier to connecting with people and ideas.

= And your definition of the information society?

The information society to me is the tangible form of Jung's collective consciousness. Most of the information resides in the subconsciousness but browsing technology has made the information more retrievable which in turn allows us greater self knowledge both as individuals and as human beings.

= What is your best experience with the Internet?

My best experience with the Internet is using e-mail to stay in touch with friends.

= And your worst experience?

My worst experience was learning how to use it before technology surpassed my ineptitude.

MICHAEL MARTIN (Berkeley, California)

#Founder and president of Travlang, a site dedicated both to travel and languages

Michael Martin created a Foreign Languages for Travelers section on his university website in 1994 when he was a physics student in New York. A year later, after its dizzying growth, he launched Travlang, a site that quickly became a major portal for travel and languages and won a best travel site award in 1997. Martin, now an experimental physics researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, sold it to GourmetMarket.com in February 1999, who sold it to iiGroup in January 2000. By July 2000, the site was pulling in two million visitors a month.

Travlang has two main sections. Foreign Languages for Travelers allows you to learn 70 different languages on the Web. Translating Dictionaries links to free dictionaries in Afrikaans, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, Frisian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Latin, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. You can also book your hotel, car or plane ticket, look up exchange rates and browse 7,000 other language and travel sites.

*Interview of August 25, 1998

= How did using the Internet change your professional life?

Well, certainly we've made a little business of our website! The Internet is really a great tool for communicating with people you wouldn't have the opportunity to interact with otherwise. I truly enjoy the global collaboration that has made our Foreign Languages for Travelers pages possible.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

I think the Web is an ideal place to bring different cultures and people together, and that includes being multilingual. Our Travlang site is so popular because of this, and people desire to feel in touch with other parts of the world.

I think computerized full-text translations will become more common, enabling a lot of basic communications with even more people. This will also help bring the Internet more completely to the non-English speaking world.

YOSHI MIKAMI (Fujisawa, Japan)

#Creator of The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet, and co-author of The Multilingual Web Guide

Set up in December 1995 by Yoshi Mikami, The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet (known as Logos Home Page or Kotoba Home Page) gives for each language a brief history, its features, writing system and character set and keyboard for computer and Internet processing.

Yoshi Mikami is also the co-author (with Kenji Sekine and Nobutoshi Kohara) of
The Multilingual Web Guide, first published in Japanese in August 1997 (O'Reilly
Japan, ISBN 4-900900-23-0), and translated into English, French and German.

*Interview of December 17, 1998

= What is your experience with languages?

My native tongue is Japanese. Because I had my graduate education in the US and worked in the computer business, I became bilingual in Japanese and American English. I was always interested in languages and different cultures, so I learned some Russian, French and Chinese along the way. In late 1995, I created on the Web The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet and tried to summarize there the brief history, linguistic and phonetic features, writing system and computer processing aspects for each of the six major languages of the world, in English and Japanese. As I gained more experience, I invited my two associates to help me write a book on viewing, understanding and creating multilingual web pages, which was published in August 1997 as The Multilingual Web Guide, in a Japanese edition, the world's first book on such a subject.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

Thousands of years ago, in Egypt, China and elsewhere, people were more concerned about communicating their laws and thoughts not in just one language, but in several. In our modern world, most nation states have each adopted one language for their own use. I predict greater use of different languages and multilingual pages on the Internet, not a simple gravitation to American English, and also more creative use of multilingual computer translation. 99% of the websites created in Japan are written in Japanese.

JOHN MARK OCKERBLOOM (Pennsylvania)

#Founder of The On-Line Books Page, listing freely-available online books

The On-Line Books Page lists over 12,000 freely-available online books in English. It was founded in 1993 by John Mark Ockerbloom, who the same year started the website of the CMU CS (Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science). In 1998, John graduated from Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) with a Ph.D. in computer science. He has now moved to Penn (University of Pennsylvania), where he works with the library and the computer science department doing digital library research and development. The On-Line Books Page also joined Penn's digital library, and John hopes it can be greatly expanded and upgraded while being integrated with other digital library resources.

*Interview of September 2, 1998

= How did your website begin?

I was the original Webmaster here at CMU CS, and started our local Web in 1993. The local Web included pages pointing to various locally developed resources, and originally The On-Line Books Page was just one of these pages, containing pointers to some books put online by some of the people in our department. (Robert Stockton had made Web versions of some of Project Gutenberg's texts.)

After a while, people started asking about books at other sites, and I noticed that a number of sites (not just Gutenberg, but also Wiretap and some other places) had books online, and that it would be useful to have some listing of all of them, so that you could go to one place to download or view books from all over the Net. So that's how my index got started.

I eventually gave up the webmaster job in 1996, but kept The On-Line Books Page, since by then I'd gotten very interested in the great potential the Net had for making literature available to a wide audience. At this point there are so many books going online that I have a hard time keeping up (and in fact have a large backlog of books to list). But I hope to keep up my online books works in some form or another.

= How do you see the future?

I am very excited about the potential of the Internet as a mass communication medium in the coming years. I'd also like to stay involved, one way or another, in making books available to a wide audience for free via the Net, whether I make this explicitly part of my professional career, or whether I just do it as a spare-time volunteer.

*Interview of August 5, 1999

= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?

I'm not sure which debate you have in mind. But I think it's important for people on the Web to understand that copyright is a social contract that's designed for the public good — where the public includes both authors and readers.

This means that authors should have the right to exclusive use of their creative works for limited times, as is expressed in current copyright law. But it also means that their readers have the right to copy and reuse the work at will once copyright expires. In the US now, there are various efforts to take rights away from readers, by restricting fair use, lengthening copyright terms (even with some proposals to make them perpetual) and extending intellectual property to cover facts separate from creative works (such as found in the "database copyright" proposals). There are even proposals to effectively replace copyright law altogether with potentially much more onerous contract law. I find it much harder to sympathize with MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) head Jack Valenti's plea to stop copying of copyrighted movies when I know that if he had his way, *no* movie would ever enter the public domain. (Mary Bono mentioned this wish of his in Congress last year.)

If media companies are seen to try to lock up everything that they can get away with, I don't find it surprising that some consumers react by putting on-line anything *they* can get away with. Unfortunately, doing that in turn takes away the legitimate rights of authors.

How to practically solve this? Stakeholders in this debate have to face reality, and recognize that both producers and consumers of works have legitimate interests in their use. If intellectual property is then negotiated by a balance of principles, rather than as the power play it's too often ends up being ("big money vs. rogue pirates") we may be able to come up with some reasonable accommodations.

CAOIMHIN O DONNAILE (Island of Skye, Scotland)

#Maintains European Minority Languages on the main site with information on
Scottish Gaelic

Maintained on the site of the college Sabhal Mór Ostaig by Caoimhín P. Ó Donnaíle, European Minority Languages is a list of minority languages by alphabetic order and by language family.

*Interview of August 18, 1998

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

I see four main points:

- The Internet has contributed and will contribute to the wildfire spread of
English as a world language.

- The Internet can greatly help minority languages, but this will not happen by itself. It will only happen if people want to maintain the language as an aim in itself.

- The Web is very useful for delivering language lessons, and there is a big demand for this.

- The Unicode (ISO 10646) character set standard is very important and will greatly assist in making the Internet more multilingual.

*Interview of January 15, 2000

= What exactly do you do professionally?

I teach computing (through the Gaelic language) at a college on the island of Skye in Scotland. I maintain the college website, which is the main site worldwide with information on Scottish Gaelic.

= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?

I haven't been following the debate, but I think the duration of copyright is far too long. Other than that I think that copyright should be respected in general.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

There is a danger that English will take over the world because of the spread of the Internet. However, if people are keen to maintain other languages, then the Internet will help with this.

= What is your best experience with the Internet?

[Private matters.]

= And your worst experience?

I don't have any really bad experiences with the Internet. Just the usual - spam, hackers, but nothing really bad.

*Interview of May 31st, 2001

= What has happened since our last interview?

There has been a great expansion in the use of information technology at the Gaelic-medium college here. Far more computers, more computing staff, flat screens. Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic spell-checking, Gaelic online terminology database. More hits on our web site. More use of sound. Gaelic radio (both Scottish and Irish) now available continuously worldwide via the Internet. Major project has been translation the Opera web-browser into Gaelic - the first software of any size available in Gaelic.

= Do you have anything to add to your previous answers?

I would emphasise the point that as regards the future of endangered languages, the Internet speeds everything up. If people don't care about preserving languages, the Internet and accompanying globalisation will greatly speed their demise. If people do care about preserving them, the Internet will be a tremendous help.

= How much do you still work with paper?

I work with paper a lot, but far less than with computer delivered information. I write about 2.000 e-mails per year, compared to about 100 letters and about 500 phone calls and about 15 faxes.

= Will there still be a place for paper in the future?

Yes, there will still be a place for paper for a long long time to come, but its share will continue to decline compared to computer-delivered information.

= What do you think about e-books?

I don't know much about what e-books are. WWW is the really important thing.

JACQUES PATAILLOT (Paris)

#Management Consultant with the firm Cap Gemini Ernst & Young

*Interview of January 26, 2000 (original interview in French)

= Can you tell us about your company's website?

The Ernst & Young France website was created in 1998. It started out as just an advertisement for the firm and its activities and grew naturally from there.

= How did using the Internet change your professional life?

The Internet changed (and changes) our professional life in two ways:

- It provides our consultants with data about present and possible clients.
These are the communication/information aspects.

- The Internet has generated new needs among firms, so management consultancies have and are developing e-commerce solutions such as eprocurement, efulfilment, etc. A whole new range of activities is available. This will revolutionise the world of consulting and major investments are being made to develop such e-solutions.

= How do you see the future?

In the short term, as consultants, we'll also be affected by the growth of online services through the Internet. For some consulting, subject matter experts can answer clients and possible clients through the Web. We're moving towards online consulting.

= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?

The Internet was conceived as an "open world", so copyright is a tricky probem.
I can't see much of a solution.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

Unfortunately, a multilingual Internet is quite unlikely. English is too strong, and the duplication of texts and data isn't feasible.

= What is your best experience with the Internet?

When I can quickly find the information I'm looking for.

= And your worst experience?

The opposite situation — getting lost when I'm looking for something.

PETER RAGGETT (Paris)

#Head of the Centre for Documentation and Information (CDI) of the OECD
(Organisation for Economic and Co-operation Development)

"The OECD groups 29 member countries in an organisation that, most importantly, provides governments a setting in which to discuss, develop and perfect economic and social policy. They compare experiences, seek answers to common problems and work to co-ordinate domestic and international policies that increasingly in today's globalised world must form a web of even practice across nations. (…) The OECD is a club of like-minded countries. It is rich, in that OECD countries produce two thirds of the world's goods and services, but it is not an exclusive club. Essentially, membership is limited only by a country's commitment to a market economy and a pluralistic democracy. The core of original members has expanded from Europe and North America to include Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Korea. And there are many more contacts with the rest of the world through programmes with countries in the former Soviet bloc, Asia, Latin America - contacts which, in some cases, may lead to membership." (extract of the website)

The Centre for Documentation and Information (CDI) is charged with providing information to agents of the OECD in support of their research work. It has about 60,000 monographs and about 2,500 periodical titles in its collections. The CDI also provides information in electronic format from databases, CD-ROMs and the Internet.

Peter Raggett, the Head of the CDI, has been a professional librarian for nearly twenty years, fist working in UK government libraries and now at the OECD since 1994. He has been working with the Internet since 1996. He is in charge of the CDI Intranet pages, which are one of the chief sources of information for OECD personnel.

*Interview of June 18, 1998

= What exactly do you do on the Internet?

I have to filter the information for library users which means that I must know the sites and the links that they have. I chose several hundred sites to allow access to them from the OECD Intranet and these sites are part of the virtual reference desk which the library has made available to the Organisations's staff. As well as these links, this virtual reference desk contains pages of references to articles, monographs and web sites corresponding to different ongoing research projects at the OECD, network access to CD-ROMs and a monthly list of new titles. The library catalogue will soon be available on the Intranet.

= How do you see the future?

The Internet has provided researchers with a vast database of information. The problem for them is to find what they are seeking. Never has the information overload been so obvious as when one tries to find information on a topic by searching the Internet. Information managers have a large role to play in searching and arranging the information on the Internet.

I expect that there will be an expansion in Internet use for education and research. This means that libraries will have to create virtual libraries where students can follow a course offered by an institution at the other side of the world.

Personally, I see myself becoming more and more a virtual librarian. My clients may not meet me face-to-face but instead will contact me by e-mail, telephone or fax and I will do the research and send them the results electronically.

*Interview of August 4, 1999

= What has happened since our first interview?

Our Intranet site will be completely renovated by the end of the year, as we will be putting the library catalogue on the Intranet. This will allow our users to access the catalogue across our Intranet. The catalogue will be Z39.50 compliant.

= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?

The copyright question is still very unclear. Publishers naturally want their fees for each article ordered and librarians and end-users want to be able download immediately full text of articles. At the moment each publisher seems to have its own policy for access to electronic versions and they would benefit from having some kind of homogenous policy, preferably allowing unlimited downloading of their electronic material.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

I think it is incumbent on European organisations and businesses to try and offer websites in three or four languages if resources permit. In this age of globalisation and electronic commerce, businesses are finding that they are doing business across many countries. Allowing French, German, Japanese speakers to easily read one's web site as well as English speakers will give a business a competitive edge in the domain of electronic trading.

= What is your best experience with the Internet?

Finding within 10 minutes articles and information on a professor who was visiting the Organisation.

= And your worst experience?

Connection problems and slow transfer of data.

*Interview of July 31, 2000

= What has happened since our last interview?

The catalogue was mounted onto our Intranet pages in October 1999. This allows all OECD agents to search the CDI's catalogue easily from their own offices.

= How much do you still work with paper?

We are still providing photocopies of periodical articles, although our use of paper has diminished slightly, due to the availability of full text articles on the Internet in PDF format. Our loans of monographs has not decreased since the advent of the Internet.

= Will there still be a place for paper in the future?

I think that there will still be a place for some use of paper despite the advent of electronic books. The use of paper will lessen as people get more and more used to electronic books.

= What do you think about e-books?

It is interesting to see that the electronic book mimics the traditional book as much as possible except that the paper page is replaced by a screen. I can see that the electronic book will replace some of the present paper products but not all of them. I also hope that electronic books will be waterproof so that I can continue reading in the bath.

= What do you suggest to give blind and partially-sighted people easier access to the Web?

I predict an increase in the use of sounds, where blind and partially-sighted people will be able to hear the text of web sites using loudspeakers or earphones.

= What is your definition of cyberspace?

Cyberspace is that area "out there" which is on the other end of my PC when I connect to the Internet. Any ISP (Internet service provider) or web page provider is in cyberspace as far as his users or customers are concerned.

= And your definition of the information society?

The information society is the society where the most valued product is information. Up to the 20th century, manufactured goods were the most valued products. They have been replaced by information. In fact, people are now talking of the knowledge society where the most valuable economic product is the knowledge inside our heads.

HENRI SLETTENHAAR (Geneva)

#Professor in communication technology at Webster University

Henri Slettenhaar has extensive knowledge of communication technology. He joined the European Center for Particle Research (CERN) in 1958 to work with the first digital computer and was involved in the development of CERN's first digital networks. His US experience began in 1966 when he joined a team at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) for 18 months to build a film digitizer. Returning to SLAC in 1983, he designed a digital monitoring system, which was used for more than 10 years. For nearly twenty years now he has been teaching information technology at Webster University, Geneva. He is the head of the Telecom Management Program created in Fall 2000. He is also a consultant for numerous organizations.

In 1992, Henri Slettenhaar founded the (Swiss) Silicon Valley Association (SVA) and, since then, has been constantly networking between Switzerland and California, taking study groups to Silicon Valley. These study tours include visits to outstanding companies, start-up, research centers and universities in the Silicon Valley and in other high-technology areas such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Finland, etc., with the aim of exploring new developments in information technology such as the Internet, multimedia, and telecommunications. Participants have the opportunity to learn about state-of-the-art research and development, strategies and business ventures through presentations and discussions, product demonstrations and site tours.

*Interview of December 21, 1998

= How did using the Internet change your professional life?

I can't imagine my professional life without the Internet. Most of my communication is now via e-mail. I've been using email for the last 20 years, most of that time to keep in touch with colleagues in a very narrow field. Since the explosion of the Internet, and especially the invention of the Web, I communicate mainly by e-mail. Most of my presentations are now on the Web and the courses I teach are all web-extended. All the details of my Silicon Valley Tours are on the Web. Without the Internet we wouldn't be able to function. And I use the Internet is as a giant database. I can find information today with the click of a mouse.

= How do you see the future?

I think I'll be relying more and more on it for information and activities related to my work. As for languages, I'm delighted there are so many offerings in the original language now. I much prefer to read the original with difficulty than getting a bad translation.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

I see multilingualism as a very important issue. Local communities that are on the Web should principally use the local language for their information. If they want to present it to the world community as well, it should be in English too. I see a real need for bilingual websites.

*Interview of August 23, 1999

= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?

It is an important issue and will be solved like in the past with all new technologies.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

There are two main categories on the Web in my opinion. The first one is the global outreach for business and information. Here the language is definitely English first, with local versions where appropriate. The second one is local information of all kinds in the most remote places. If the information is meant for people of an ethnic and/or language group, it should be in that language first with perhaps a summary in English. We have seen lately how important these local websites are — in Kosovo and Turkey, to mention just the most recent ones. People were able to get information about their relatives through these sites.

= What is your best experience with the Internet?

Getting pictures directly from space (Jupiter).

= And your worst experience?

Information overload. I get too much and I do not have the tools yet to get only what I want.

*Interview of August 30, 2000

= What has happened since our last interview?

The explosion of mobile technology. The mobile phone has become for many people, including me, the personal communicator which allows you to be anywhere anytime and still be reachable. But the mobile Internet is still a dream. The new services on mobile (GSM) phones are extremely primitive and expensive (WAP = Wait and Pay). See my article about Finland (in French).

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

Multilingualism has expanded greatly. Many e-commerce websites are multilingual now and there are companies that sell products which make localization possible (adaptation of websites to national markets).

= What do you think about e-books?

I have a hard time believing people would want to read from a screen. I much prefer myself to read and touch a real book.

= What is your definition of cyberspace?

Our virtual space. The area of digital information (bits, not atoms). It is a limited space when you think of the spectrum. It has to be administered well so all the earth's people can use it and benefit from it (eliminate the digital divide).

= And your definition of the information society?

The people who already use cyberspace in their daily lives to such an extent that it is hard to imagine living without it (the other side of the divide).

*Interview of July 8, 2001

= What has happened since our last interview?

All I can come up with is the tremendous change I am experiencing with having a "broadband" connection at home. To be connected at all times is so completelely different from dial-up.

I now receive e-mail as soon as it arrives, I can listen to my favorite radio stations wherever they are. I can listen to the news when I want to. Get the music I like all the time.

Today for instance, I heared the comments and saw the score board of Wimbledon tennis in real time. The only thing which is missing is good quality real time video. The bandwidth is too low for that.

I now have a wired and a wireless LAN (local area network) in my home. I can use my laptop anywhere in the house and outside, even at the neighbors and still being connected. With the same technology I am now able to use my wireless LAN card in my computer when I travel. For instance during my recent visit to Stockholm there was connectivity in the Hotel, the Conference center, the airport and even in the Irish Pub!

MURRAY SUID (Palo Alto, California)

#Writer, works for EDVantage Software, an Internet company specialized in educational software

Murray Suid lives in Palo Alto (California), in the heart of the Silicon Valley. He writes educational books (e.g., Ten-Minute Grammar Grabbers), books for kids (e.g., The Kids' How to Do Almost Everything Guide), multimedia scripts (e.g., The Writing Trek), and screenplays (e.g., Summer of the Flying Saucer — to be produced by Magma Films, Ireland).

*Interview of September 7, 1998

= How did using the Internet change your professional life?

Professionally, the Internet has become my major research tool, largely — but not entirely — replacing the traditional library and even replacing person-to-person research. Now, instead of phoning people or interviewing them face to face, I do it via e-mail. Because of speed, it has also enabled me to collaborate with people at a distance, particularly on screenplays. (I've worked with two producers in Germany.) Also, digital correspondence is so easy to store and organize, I find that I have easy access to information exchanged this way. Thus, e-mailing facilitates keeping track of ideas and materials.

The Internet has increased my correspondence dramatically. Like most people, I find that e-mail works better than snail mail. My geographic range of correspondents has also increased — extending mainly to Europe. In the old days, I hardly ever did transatlantic pen-palling. I also find that e-mailing is so easy, I am able to find more time to assist other writers with their work — a kind of a virtual writing group. This isn't merely altruistic. I gain a lot when I give feedback. But before the Internet, doing so was more of an effort.

= How do you see the relationship between the print media and the Internet?

For one thing, the Internet serves other print media. My recently published book, The Kids' How to Do (Almost) Everything Guide, would probably not have been done prior to the invention of e-mail because it would have cost too much in money/time to locate the experts. So the Internet is a powerful research tool for writers of books, articles, etc.

Also, in a time of great change, many "facts" don't stay factual for long. In other words, many books go quickly out of date. But if a book can be web extended (living partly in cyberspace), then an author can easily update and correct it, whereas otherwise the author would have to wait a long time for the next edition, if indeed a next edition ever came out.

Also, in terms of marketing, the Web seems crucial, especially for small publishers that can't afford to place ads in major magazines and on the radio. Although large companies continue to have an advantage, in cyberspace small publishers can put up very competitive marketing efforts.

We think that paper books will be around for a while, because using them is habitual. Many readers like the feel of paper, and the heft of a book held in the hands or carried in a purse or backpack. I haven't yet used a digital book, and I think I might prefer one — because of ease of search, because of color, because of sound, etc. Obviously, multimedia books can be easily downloaded from the Web, and such books probably will dominate publishing in the future. Not yet though.

= How do you see the future?

I'm not very state-of-the-art so I'm not sure. I would like to have direct access to text — digitally read books in the Library of Congress, for example, just as now I can read back issues of many newspapers. Currently, while I can find out about books on-line, I need to get the books into my hands to use them. I would rather access them on-line and copy sections that I need for my work, whereas today I either have to photocopy relevant pages, or scan them in, etc.

I expect that soon I will use the Internet for video telephoning, and that will be a happy development.

I do not know if I will publish books on the Web — as opposed to publishing paper books. Probably that will happen when books become multimedia. (I currently am helping develop multimedia learning materials, and it's a form of teaching that I like a lot — blending text, movies, audio, graphics, and — when possible — interactivity).

*Interview of August 3, 1999

= What has happened since our 1998 interview?

In addition to "web extending" books, we are now web-extending our multimedia
(CD-ROM) products — to update and enrich them.

= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web? What practical solutions do you have?

The secret, I think, is to create information packages that cannot be economically stolen. In other words, the product being sold needs to have more value than a copy. For example, it's currently easier and cheaper for someone to buy one of our books than to photocopy a book — in its entirety. So we try to design our books in a way that makes all the pages valuable, and not just a few pages.

We would like to sell our books online — in PDF format — but have not investigated ways to keep buyers from re-distributing the files. Maybe this is possible through encryption. But we don't know how to do it.

= What is your best experience with the Internet?

Meeting experts and authors who have contributed to our publishing ventures.

= And your worst experience?

Being insulted by a stranger — someone who assumed that I was bad without knowing anything about me.

*Interview of October 10, 2000

= What has happened since our last interview?

Our company — EDVantage Software — has become an Internet company instead of a multimedia (CD-ROM) company. We deliver educational material online to students and teachers.

= How much do you still work with paper?

Very little, though of course there are printouts, especially for meetings when we review manuscripts.

= Will there still be a place for paper in the future?

I hope not.

= What do you think about e-books?

I haven't used them.

= What is your definition of cyberspace?

Anywhere = Everywhere. The simplest example: My mailbox follows me wherever I go.

= And your definition of the information society?

A society in which ideas and knowledge are more important than things.

JUNE THOMPSON (Hull, UK)

#Manager of the C&IT (Communications & Information Technology) Centre at the
University of Hull

Since its inception in 1989, the C&IT Centre has been based in the Language Institute at the University of Hull, United Kingdom, and aims to promote and encourage the use of computers in language learning and teaching. The Centre provides information on how computer assisted language learning (CALL) can be effectively integrated into existing courses and offers support for language lecturers who are using computers in their teaching (e.g. Internet Resources for Language Teachers and Learners).

Hosted by the C&IT Centre, EUROCALL is the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning. This association of language teaching professionals from Europe and worldwide aims to: promote the use of foreign languages within Europe; provide a European focus for all aspects of the use of technology for language learning; and enhance the quality, dissemination and efficiency of CALL (computer assisted language learning) materials. EUROCALL supported the creation of WELL (Web Enhanced Language Learning), which offer high-quality Web resources in 12 languages, selected and described by subject experts, plus information and examples on how to use them for teaching and learning.

*Interview of December 14, 1998

= How did using the Internet change your professional life?

The use of the Internet has brought an enormous new dimension to our work of supporting language teachers in their use of technology in teaching.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

The Internet has the potential to increase the use of foreign languages, and our organisation certainly opposes any trend towards the dominance of English as the language of the Internet. An interesting paper on this topic was delivered by Madanmohan Rao at the WorldCALL Conference in Melbourne, July 1998.

I suspect that for some time to come, the use of Internet-related activities for languages will continue to develop alongside other technology-related activities (e.g. use of CDROMs - not all institutions have enough networked hardware). In the future I can envisage use of Internet playing a much larger part, but only if such activities are pedagogy-driven. Our organisation is closely associated with the WELL project which devotes itself to these issues.

PAUL TREANOR (Netherlands)

#Created on his personal website a section on the future of languages in Europe

Created in 1996, this website is divided into six sections: Net/cyberspace ideology; geopolitics/nationalism; the future of Europe; urban theory/planning; liberalism and ethics; and academic issues. For legal reasons, some pages with a high risk of legal action are only located at the duplicate website. In this way, if the second website is closed down the first can continue operating.

Paul Treanor also writes articles for Telopolis, a German online magazine.

*Interview of August 18, 1998

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

You speak of the Web in the singular. As you may have read (on my website), I think "The Web" is a political, not a technological concept. A civilization is possible with extremely advanced computers, but no interconnection. The idea that there should be "one Web" comes from the liberal tradition of the single, open, preferably global market.

The Internet should simply be broken up in multiple Nets, and Europe should cut the links with the US and build a systematically incompatible net for Europe. (…) Remember that 15 years ago, everyone thought there would be one global TV station, CNN. Now there are French, German and Spanish global TV channels.

So the answer to your question is that the "one Web" will split up anyway — probably into these four components:

1. An internal US/Canadian anglophone Net, with many of the original characteristics

2. Separate national Nets, with limited outside links

3. A new global Net specifically to link the nets of category 2

4. Possibly a specific EU Net

As you can see, this structure parallels the existing geopolitical structure.
All telecommunications infrastructure has followed similar patterns. (…)

Current EU policy pretends to be neutral in this way, but in fact it is supporting the growth of English as a contact language in EU communications policy.

*Interview of July 25, 1999

= What has happened since our 1998 interview?

The nature of the Internet has changed dramatically in the last two years. It is no longer possible to speak of idealistic social or political effects: the Net is entirely commercialised. I find this entirely predictable. I have always described the Internet as a liberal structure, a market of information. It is logical that it is now commercialised.

It is often said the Internet is now like television. Certainly the content is determined by market forces and is increasingly split into very large sites with huge quantities of information. In some ways, these are like television channels, but the metaphor is not completely accurate.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

The future multilingualism of the Net will be determined by market forces. At present there's no political will to enforce multilingualism. But it is in the commercial interest of the content providers to have material in local languages. At least in Europe. For small languages in Africa, there is no market potential.

= What is your best experience with the Internet?

I have no illusions about the Internet. I can't remember any positive exception to that.

= And your worst experience?

The worst thing I have seen on the Internet recently is the way thousands of people added the logo of the Belgrade radio B92 to their websites, without asking what it was and what politics it represented. In fact it was already broadcasting from NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) aircraft. The campaign shows how easy it is to manipulate the new media scene…

FRANCOIS VADROT (Paris)

#Founder, chairman and managing director of FTPress (French Touch Press), a cybermedia company

*Interview of May 20, 2000 (original interview in French)

= What is FTPress?

FTPress (French Touch Press) is a French cyberpress company. It has created the following websites:

— www.ftpress.com, which describes the concept, products and structure of the media company, and gives very informal portraits of the team members.

— www.internetactu.com, Internet Actu's website, which carries news about the Internet and new technology. It was launched on 9 September 1999 in its present form. It replaced LMB Actu (Le Micro Bulletin Actu - The Micro News Bulletin), published by the Information Systems Department (Délégation aux systèmes d'information (DSI)) at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)).

— www.pixelactu.com, Pixel Actu's website, giving news about digital pictures, set up on 31 January 2000.

— www.esanteactu.com, eSanté Actu's website, with news about eHealth — the interface between health (as seen by professionals) and the Internet — launched on 16 May 2000.

- www.lafontaine.net, the website of Jean de la Fontaine (a 17th century French poet and writer, renowned for his Fables), containing all his works, as well as many drawings, pastiches and recordings. It also features a "Daily Fable".

- www.commissairetristan.com, the website of Superintendant Tristan's adventures (Les aventures du Commissaire Tristan), the first (free) online crime novel, co-produced by FTPress and AlloCiné and launched in mid-June 2000.

Many projects are planned in the next months.

= What exactly do you do professionally?

Very briefly, developing a company, FTPress, that specializes in the online press — for the moment, that is, because things are moving so fast that it might not be doing that any more in a few months time. The idea of FTPress is to create professional media, each specialized in an economic area, such as health, cars, digital pictures, human resources and logistics. Each medium deals with the economic, technological, political and social aspects of a sector being changed by the arrival of new technology and the Internet. The first one was Internet Actu, set up at France's National Centre for Scientific Research in February 1996, followed by Pixel Actu (February 2000) and eSanté Actu (May 2000). We began with written products, but we're now focusing on multimedia, including TV programmes in the near future. FTPress also sets up media for outside customers.

= How do you see your professional future?

I see my professional future as a professional "here and now." If you'd asked me that two years ago, I would have said that through working with the Internet (as head of information systems at the CNRS) and writing things about the Internet (as editor of LMB Actu), I was dreaming of creating an Internet start-up. But I was wondering how to do that. If you'd asked me the question a year ago, I would have answered that I'd made the jump, was all set and had told my bosses I was leaving, to go off and create FTPress. I just didn't want to stay where I was any more. I was becoming bitter. I wanted to start my own company or else take a year's sabbatical to do nothing. Today, I'm fully involved in the firm. I feel I'm living some of the stories we read in the press about start-ups. It's hard to do physically because it's all growing so fast. So I see my future on the beach, without the Internet, relaxing with my wife ;-)

= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web? What practical suggestions do you have?

It's a valid debate. Some people, often those hiding behind the authority of an institution that ought to respect copyright, don't respect it and have no qualms about putting their names to articles written by somebody else. At FTPress, we more or less follow the guidelines of the GPL (a public licence used as a basis by Linux for free software). Our material can be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes, with the source mentioned of course. The authors of these articles are paid at a standard rate, have journalist status and are also given stock options in the company. This stake in the firm's activity and its value brings the journalist's pay up to the level for an article written for a given publication. But FTPress no longer pays authors extra if the article is sold to a third party for their own use. I think this is a solution to the problem as far as the press is concerned. But it's a complex issue with many aspects and no single answer.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

I don't know how to answer that, except with a truism like "Everyone will keep their own language, with English as a language of exchange." But do we really believe all the world's people are going to communicate in every senses? Maybe. Through written or oral machine translation systems? It's hard to imagine having in the near future the means to translate nuances of thought unique to a given country. We'd have to translate more than the language, and set up bridges to convey feelings. Unless everthing is standardized by globalisation. So I think the real issue is a multicultural Internet.

= What is your best experience with the Internet?

When we passed the 10.000 subscribers' mark for LMB Actu, at the beginning of 1998.

= And your worst experience?

The time when we made a mistake in Internet Actu and angry messages from subscribers began pouring in just 10 minutes later. We all started panicking because LMB Actu had just gone private and FTPress, the new company, relied solely on its successor, Internet Actu. If we'd lost a lot of subscribers, we'd've been finished. But in the end, all the reaction allowed us to start a column for readers which was very popular. Mistakes often turn out to be beneficial, as soon as you admit them openly. These exchanges establish links between readers and authors.

ROBERT WARE (Colorado)

#Creator of OneLook Dictionaries, a fast finder of words in 650 dictionaries

*Interview of September 2, 1998

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

On the personal side, I was almost entirely in contact with people who spoke one language and did not have much incentive to expand language abilities. Being in contact with the entire world has a way of changing that. And changing it for the better! I have been slow to start including non-English dictionaries (partly because I am monolingual). But you will now find a few included.

An interesting thing happened earlier and I think I learned something from it.

In 1994, I was working for a college and trying to install a software package on a particular type of computer. I located a person who was working on the same problem and we began exchanging email. Suddenly, it hit me… the software was written only 30 miles away but I was getting help from a person half way around the world. Distance and geography no longer mattered!

OK, this is great! But what is it leading to? I am only able to communicate in English but, fortunately, the other person could use English as well as German which was his mother tongue. The Internet has removed one barrier (distance) but with that comes the barrier of language.

It seems that the Internet is moving people in two quite different directions at the same time. The Internet (initially based on English) is connecting people all around the world. This is further promoting a common language for people to use for communication. But it is also creating contact between people of different languages and creates a greater interest in multilingualism. A common language is great but in no way replaces this need.

So the Internet promotes both a common language and multilingualism. The good news is that it helps provide solutions. The increased interest and need is creating incentives for people around the world to create improved language courses and other assistance and the Internet is providing fast and inexpensive opportunities to make them available.

Copyright © 2001 Marie Lebert