*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.
[FR] Yoshi Mikami (Fujisawa, Japon)
#Créateur de The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet et co-auteur de Pour un web multilingue
Créé en décembre 1995 par Yoshi Mikami, le site "The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet", communément appelé "Logos Home Page" ou "Kotoba Home Page", donne, pour chaque langue, un bref historique, les caractéristiques, le système d'écriture, le jeu de caractères et la configuration du clavier pour l'utilisation de l'ordinateur et de l'internet dans la langue donnée.
Yoshi est également co-auteur (avec Kenji Sekine et Nobutoshi Kohara) de Pour un web multilingue, paru en japonais, anglais, allemand et français (Paris, Editions O'Reilly, septembre 1998, ISBN 2-84177-055-9).
*Entretien du 17 décembre 1998 (entretien original en anglais)