= 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;