The Web is also where we get most of our information on the topics we're interested in. We regularly monitor sites that supply daily and weekly news. So we definitely make more use of the Internet than we do other written sources.
We also use electronic mail a great deal to keep in touch with our contributors, to obtain information and carry out projects. CEVEIL is a "network structure" which might not survive without the Internet to link all the people involved in it.
The Web is also the most important means for distributing our products to target clients — sending electronic news to our subscribers, creating an online magazine, and distributing information and documents through our website.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
Multilingualism on the Internet is the logical and natural consequence of the diversity of human beings. Because the Web was first developed and used in the United States, it's not really surprising it started out as — and still is — essentially Anglophone. But this is beginning to change, because most new users will not have English as their mother tongue and because non-English-speaking communities already on the Web will no longer accept the dominance of English and will want to use their own language to some extent.
We can envisage, in a few years time, a situation similar to the one in publishing concerning use of different languages. This means only a small number of languages will be used (compared to the several thousand that exist). So we think the Web should try to further support minority cultures and languages, particularly in the case of dispersed communities.
The arrival on the Internet of languages other than English, while demanding genuine readjustment and providing undeniable enrichment, emphasizes the need for linguistic tools to cope with the situation. These will emerge from research and promoting awareness in areas such as machine translation, standardization, searching for information, automatic summarizing, and so on.
= How do you see the future?
The Internet is here to stay. The arrival on it of languages other than English is also irreversible. So we have to take that into account from an economic, social, political and cultural point of view. Sectors such as advertising, vocational training, knowledge management, and work in groups or within networks will have to change. This brings us back to the need to develop really effective technology and tools to encourage exchanges in a truly multilingual global village.
*Interview of March 13, 2000 (original interview in French)