4. Translation Resources
5. Language-Related Research
6. Index of Websites
7. Index of Names
1. INTRODUCTION
It is true that the Internet transcends limitations of time, distances and borders, but what about languages?
From the beginning, the main language of the Internet has been English, and it still is today, but the use of other languages is steadily increasing. Sooner or later, the distribution of languages on the Internet will correspond to the language distribution on the planet, and free translation software in all languages will be available for an instantaneous translation of any website. But there is still a lot to do before multilingualism can be really effective.
This study is divided into four parts: Multilingualism; Language Resources;
Translation Resources; and Language-Related Research.
In the chapter about multilingualism, we will study the growth of non-English languages on the Internet. French will be taken as an example, and the efforts in the European Union relating to the diversity of languages will be examined.
In the chapter about language resources, we will give some examples of the language resources available on the Web — sites indexing language resources, language directories, language dictionaries and glossaries, textual databases, and terminological databases.