*Interview of September 4, 1998
= What did using the Internet bring to your company?
The Internet has made comparatively little difference to our company. It is an additional medium rather than one which will replace all others.
We will continue to have a company website, and to publish a version of the magazine on the Web, but it will remain only one factor in our work. We do use the Internet as a source of information which we then distill for our readers, who would otherwise be faced with the biggest problem of the Web — undiscriminating floods of information.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
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 only in English, the common denominator of our readers. When we use an article which was originally in a language other than English, or report an interview which was conducted in a language other than English, we translate into English and publish only the English version. This is because the number of pages we can print is constrained, governed by our customer-base (advertisers and subscribers). But for our Web edition we also give the original version.
STEVEN KRAUWER (Utrecht, Netherlands)
#Coordinator of ELSNET (European Network of Excellence in Human Language
Technologies)
ELSNET (European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies) has 135 European academic and industrial institutions as members. The long-term technological goal which unites the participants of ELSNET is to build multilingual speech and NL (natural language) systems with unrestricted coverage of both spoken and written language. It is funded by the European Commission.