My worst experience was learning how to use it before technology surpassed my ineptitude.
MICHAEL MARTIN (Berkeley, California)
#Founder and president of Travlang, a site dedicated both to travel and languages
Michael Martin created a Foreign Languages for Travelers section on his university website in 1994 when he was a physics student in New York. A year later, after its dizzying growth, he launched Travlang, a site that quickly became a major portal for travel and languages and won a best travel site award in 1997. Martin, now an experimental physics researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, sold it to GourmetMarket.com in February 1999, who sold it to iiGroup in January 2000. By July 2000, the site was pulling in two million visitors a month.
Travlang has two main sections. Foreign Languages for Travelers allows you to learn 70 different languages on the Web. Translating Dictionaries links to free dictionaries in Afrikaans, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, Frisian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Latin, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. You can also book your hotel, car or plane ticket, look up exchange rates and browse 7,000 other language and travel sites.
*Interview of August 25, 1998
= How did using the Internet change your professional life?
Well, certainly we've made a little business of our website! The Internet is really a great tool for communicating with people you wouldn't have the opportunity to interact with otherwise. I truly enjoy the global collaboration that has made our Foreign Languages for Travelers pages possible.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
I think the Web is an ideal place to bring different cultures and people together, and that includes being multilingual. Our Travlang site is so popular because of this, and people desire to feel in touch with other parts of the world.