TYLER CHAMBERS (Boston, Massachusetts)
#Creator of The Human-Languages Page (who became iLoveLanguages in 2001) and The
Internet Dictionary Project
The Human-Languages Page (created by Tyler Chambers in May 1994) and the Languages Catalog of the WWW Virtual Library redesigned the site in 2001 to become iLoveLanguages in 2001. It is now a comprehensive catalog of more than 2.000 language-related Internet resources in more than 100 different languages.
Tyler Chambers' other main language-related project is The Internet Dictionary Project, initiated in 1995. Its "goal is to create royalty-free translating dictionaries through the help of the Internet's citizens. This site allows individuals from all over the world to visit and assist in the translation of English words into other languages. The resulting lists of English words and their translated counterparts are then made available through this site to anyone, with no restrictions on their use." (extract from the website)
*Interview of September 14, 1998
= How did using the Internet change your professional life?
My professional life is currently completely separate from my Internet life. Professionally, I'm a computer programmer/techie (in Boston, Massachusetts) — I find it challenging and it pays the bills. Online, my work has been with making language information available to more people through a couple of my Web-based projects. While I'm not multilingual, nor even bilingual, myself, I see an importance to language and multilingualism that I see in very few other areas. The Internet has allowed me to reach millions of people and help them find what they're looking for, something I'm glad to do. It has also made me somewhat of a celebrity, or at least a familiar name in certain circles — I just found out that one of my Web projects had a short mention in Time Magazine's Asia and International issues. Overall, I think that the Web has been great for language awareness and cultural issues — where else can you randomly browse for 20 minutes and run across three or more different languages with information you might potentially want to know? Communications mediums make the world smaller by bringing people closer together; I think that the Web is the first (of mail, telegraph, telephone, radio, TV) to really cross national and cultural borders for the average person. Israel isn't thousands of miles away anymore, it's a few clicks away — our world may now be small enough to fit inside a computer screen.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
Multilingualism on the Web was inevitable even before the medium "took off", so to speak. 1994 was the year I was really introduced to the Web, which was a little while after its christening but long before it was mainstream. That was also the year I began my first multilingual Web project, and there was already a significant number of language-related resources online. This was back before Netscape even existed — Mosaic was almost the only Web browser, and web pages were little more than hyperlinked text documents. As browsers and users mature, I don't think there will be any currently spoken language that won't have a niche on the Web, from Native American languages to Middle Eastern dialects, as well as a plethora of "dead" languages that will have a chance to find a new audience with scholars and others alike on-line. To my knowledge, there are very few language types which are not currently online: browsers have now the capability to display Roman characters, Asian languages, the Cyrillic alphabet, Greek, Turkish, and more. Accent Software has a product called "Internet with an Accent" which claims to be able to display over 30 different language encodings. If there are currently any barriers to any particular language being on the Web, they won't last long.
= How do you see the future?