Helen Dry, moderator of the LINGUIST List, explained in her e-mail of August 18, 1998:
"The LINGUIST List, which I moderate, has a policy of posting in any language, since it's a list for linguists. However, we discourage posting the same message in several languages, simply because of the burden extra messages put on our editorial staff. (We are not a bounce-back list, but a moderated one. So each message is organized into an issue with like messages by our student editors before it is posted.) Our experience has been that almost everyone chooses to post in English. But we do link to a translation facility that will present our pages in any of 5 languages; so a subscriber need not read LINGUIST in English unless s/he wishes to. We also try to have at least one student editor who is genuinely multilingual, so that readers can correspond with us in languages other than English."
Maintained by the Yamada Language Center of the University of Oregon, the Yamada WWW Language Guides is a directory of language resources by geographic family and alphabetic family. It covers organizations, teaching institutes, curriculum materials, cultural references, and WWW links.
Language today is a new magazine for people working in applied languages: translators, interpreters, terminologists, lexicographers and technical writers. It is a collaborative project between Logos, who provide the website, and Praetorius, the UK language consultancy which keeps itself constantly informed about developments in applied languages. The site gives links to translators associations, language schools, and dictionaries.
Geoffrey Kingscott, managing director of Praetorius, answered my questions in his e-mail of September 4, 1998.
ML: "How do you see multilingualism on the Web?"
GK: "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."
ML: "What did the use of the Internet bring to your company?"
GK: "The Internet has made comparatively little difference to our company. It is an additional medium rather than one which will replace all others."
ML: "How do you see the future with the Internet?"