TOWARDS A 'LINGUISTIC DEMOCRACY' - The Internet and Languages [around the year 2000] - 5

TOWARDS A "LINGUISTIC DEMOCRACY"

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Brian King, director of the WorldWide Language Institute (WWLI), brought up the concept of "linguistic democracy" in September 1998: "Whereas 'mother-tongue education' was deemed a human right for every child in the world by a UNESCO report in the early 1950s, '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."

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Yoshi Mikami, a computer scientist at Asia Info Network in Fujisawa (Japan), launched in December 1995 the website "The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet", also known as the Logos Home Page or Kotoba Home Page. (The website was updated until September 2001.) Yoshi was also the co-author (with Kenji Sekine and Nobutoshi Kohara) of "The Multilingual Web Guide" (Japanese edition), a print book published by O'Reilly Japan in August 1997, and translated in 1998 into English, French and German.

Yoshi Mikami explained in December 1998: "My native tongue is Japanese. Because I had my graduate education in the U.S. 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 webpages, which was published in August 1997 as 'The Multilingual Web Guide', in a Japanese edition, the world's first book on such a subject."

Yoshi added in the same email interview: "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."

Robert Ware launched his website OneLook Dictionaries in April 1996 as a "fast finder" in hundreds of online dictionaries. On September 2, 1998, the fast finder could "browse" 2,058,544 words in 425 dictionaries covering various topics: business, computer/internet, medical, miscellaneous, religion, science, sports, technology, general, and slang. OneLook Dictionaries was provided as a free service by the company Study Technologies, in Englewood, Colorado.

Robert Ware explained in September 1998: "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."

In the same email interview, Robert wrote about a personal experience showing the internet could promote both a common language and multilingualism: "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."

The internet could also be a tool to develop a "cultural identity". During the Symposium on Multimedia Convergence organized by the International Labor Office (ILO) in January 1997, Shinji Matsumoto, general secretary of the Musicians' Union of Japan (MUJ), explained: "Japan is quite receptive to foreign culture and foreign technology. (…) Foreign culture is pouring into Japan and, in fact, the domestic market is being dominated by foreign products. Despite this, when it comes to preserving and further developing Japanese culture, there has been insufficient support from the government. (…) With the development of information networks, the earth is getting smaller and it is wonderful to be able to make cultural exchanges across vast distances and to deepen mutual understanding among people. We have to remember to respect national cultures and social systems."

December 1997 was a turning point for a plurilingual web. AltaVista, a leading search engine, was the first website to launch a free translation software called Babel Fish (or AltaVista Translation), which could translate up to three pages from English into French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish, and vice versa. Non-English- speaking users were thrilled. The software was developed by Systran, a pioneer company specializing in machine translation. Later on, other translation software was developed by Alis Technologies, Globalink, Lernout & Hauspie, Softissimo, Wordfast and Trados, with free and/or paid versions available on the web.

Geoffrey Kingscott was the managing director of Praetorius, a language consultancy in applied languages. He wrote in September 1998: "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

Founder of Euro-Marketing Associates and its virtual branch Global Reach, Bill Dunlap was championing the assets of e-commerce in Europe among his fellow compatriots in the U.S. Bill wrote in December 1998: "There are so few people in the U.S. interested in communicating in many languages — most Americans are still under the delusion that the rest of the world speaks English. However, here in Europe (I'm writing from France), the countries are small enough so that an international perspective has been necessary for centuries."

As the internet quickly spread worldwide, more and more people in the U.S. realized that, although English may stay the main international language for exchanges of all kinds, people did prefer to read information in their own language. To reach as large an audience as possible, companies and organizations needed to offer bilingual, trilingual, even multilingual websites, while adapting their content to a given audience. Thus the need of both localization and internationalization, which became a major trend in the following years, not only in the U.S. but in many countries, with companies setting up bilingual websites, in their language and in English, to reach a wider audience, and get more clients.

Brian King, director of the WorldWide Language Institute (WWLI), explained in September 1998: "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. 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."

In 1998, the European Network in Language and Speech (ELSNET) was a network of more than 100 European academic and industrial institutions. ELSNET members intended to build multilingual speech and natural language systems with coverage of both spoken and written language. Steven Krauwer, coordinator of ELSNET, explained in September 1998: "As a European citizen I think that multilingualism on the web is absolutely essential, as in the long run I don't think that it is a healthy situation when only those who have a reasonable command of English can fully exploit the benefits of the web. 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."

Steven added in August 1999: "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 practical solutions would he suggest for a truly 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."

Linguistic pluralism and diversity are everybody's business, as explained in a petition launched by the European Committee for the Respect of Cultures and Languages in Europe (ECRCLE) "for a humanist and multilingual Europe, rich of its cultural diversity": "Linguistic pluralism and diversity are not obstacles to the free circulation of men, ideas, goods and services, as would like to suggest some objective allies, consciously or not, of the dominant language and culture. Indeed, standardization and hegemony are the obstacles to the free blossoming of individuals, societies and the information economy, the main source of tomorrow's jobs. On the contrary, the respect for languages is the last hope for Europe to get closer to the citizens, an objective always claimed and almost never put into practice. The Union must therefore give up privileging the language of one group." The full text of the petition was available in the eleven official languages of the European Union. Among other things, the petition asked the revisors of the Treaty of the European Union to include the respect of national cultures and languages in the text of the treaty, and the national governments to "teach the youth at least two, and preferably three foreign European languages; encourage the national audiovisual and musical industries; and favour the diffusion of European works."

Henk Slettenhaar is a professor in communication technology at Webster University in Geneva, Switzerland. Henk is a trilingual European. He is Dutch, he teaches computer science in English, and he is fluent in French as a resident in neighboring France. He has regularly insisted on the need of bilingual websites, in the original language and in English. He wrote in December 1998: "I see multilingualism as a very important issue. Local communities which are on the web should use the local language first and foremost for their information. If they want to be able to present their information to the world community as well, their information should be in English as well. I see a real need for bilingual websites. (…) As far as languages are concerned, I am delighted that there are so many offerings in the original languages now. I much prefer to read the original with difficulty than to get a bad translation."

Henk added in August 1999: "There are two main categories of websites 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."

Marcel Grangier was the head of the French Section of the Swiss Federal Government's Central Linguistic Services, which means he was in charge of organizing translations into French for the Swiss government. He wrote in January 1999: "We can see multilingualism on the internet as a happy and irreversible inevitability. So we have to laugh at the doomsayers who only complain about the supremacy of English. Such supremacy is not wrong in itself, because it is mainly based on statistics (more PCs per inhabitant, more people speaking English, etc.). The answer is not to 'fight' English, much less whine about it, but to build more sites in other languages. As a translation service, we also recommend that websites be multilingual. The increasing number of languages on the internet is inevitable and can only boost multicultural exchanges. For this to happen in the best possible circumstances, we still need to develop tools to improve compatibility. Fully coping with accents and other characters is only one example of what can be done."

Alain Bron, a consultant in information systems and a writer, wrote in January 1999: "Different languages will still be used for a long time to come and this is healthy for the right to be different. The risk is of course an invasion of one language to the detriment of others, and with it the risk of cultural standardization. I think online services will gradually emerge to get around this problem. First, translators will be able to translate and comment on texts by request, but mainly sites with a large audience will provide different language versions, just as the audiovisual industry does now."

Guy Antoine, founder of Windows on Haiti, a reference website about Haitian culture, wrote in November 1999: "It is true that for all intents and purposes English will continue to dominate the web. This is not so bad in my view, in spite of regional sentiments to the contrary, because we do need a common language to foster communications between people the world over. That being said, I do not adopt the doomsday view that other languages will just roll over in submission. Quite the contrary. The internet can serve, first of all, as a repository of useful information on minority languages that might otherwise vanish without leaving a trace. Beyond that, I believe that it provides an incentive for people to learn languages associated with the cultures about which they are attempting to gather information. One soon realizes that the language of a people is an essential and inextricable part of its culture. (…)

From this standpoint, I have much less faith in mechanized tools of language translation, which render words and phrases but do a poor job of conveying the soul of a people. Who are the Haitian people, for instance, without "Kreyòl" (Creole for the non-initiated), the language that has evolved and bound various African tribes transplanted in Haiti during the slavery period? It is the most palpable exponent of commonality that defines us as a people. However, it is primarily a spoken language, not a widely written one. I see the web changing this situation more so than any traditional means of language dissemination. In Windows on Haiti, the primary language of the site is English, but one will equally find a center of lively discussion conducted in "Kreyòl". In addition, one will find documents related to Haiti in French, in the old colonial creole, and I am open to publishing others in Spanish and other languages. I do not offer any sort of translation, but multilingualism is alive and well at the site, and I predict that this will increasingly become the norm throughout the web."