Steven Krauwer, coordinator of ELSNET, is a senior lecturer/researcher in Computational Linguistics at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS (Utrecht University, Netherlands). His main interests are: machine translation; evaluation of language and speech systems; integration of language, speech and other modalities.
*Interview of September 23, 1998
= How did using the Internet change your professional life?
It's my chief way of communicating with others and my main source of information. I'm sure I'll spend the rest of my professional life trying to use it to remove or at least lower the language barriers.
= 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.