In her e-mail response of June 8, 1998, Christiane Jadelot, an engineer at
INaLF-Nancy, France, explained:
"At the request of Robert Martin, the Head of INaLF, our first pages were posted on the Internet by mid-1996. I participated in the creation of these web pages with tools that cannot be compared to the ones we have nowadays. I was working with tools on UNIX, which were not very easy to use. At this time, we had little experience in this field, and the pages were very wordy. But the managing team was thinking it was urgent for us to be known through the Internet, a tool many enterprises were already using to promote their products. As we are a Department of Research and Services (Unité de recherche et de service), we have to find clients for our computer products, the best known being the textual database FRANTEXT. I think FRANTEXT was already on the Internet [since early 1995], and there was also a prototype of the volume 14 of the TLF [Trésor de la langue française (Treasure of the French Language), by Jean Nicot, 1606]. Therefore it was necessary for INaLF activities to be known by this means. It corresponded to a general need."
Every non-English language community is working for its language to be represented on the Web and for the international Internet to be multilingual. As an example, a non-profit organization created by the Government of Quebec, the Centre d'expertise et de veille Inforoutes et Langues (CEVEIL) (Centre of Expertise and Awareness for Information Highways and Languages) is setting up, in a more specifically French-oriented approach, an expertise network and some awareness-raising activities on the language problems of information highways.
Guy Bertrand, scientific director of CEVEIL, and Cynthia Delisle, consultant, answered my questions in their e-mail of August 23, 1998.
ML: "How do you see multilingualism on the Web?"
CEVEIL: "Multilingualism on the Internet is the logical and natural consequence of the diversity of human populations. Because the Web has first been developed and used in the United States, it is not really surprising that this medium began by being essentially Anglophone (and still is at present). However this situation is beginning to change and this movement will go on expanding, both because most of the new network users will not have English as a mother tongue and because the [non-English] communities already present on the Web will no longer accept the hegemony of the English language and will want to use the Internet in their own language, at least partially.
We can plan that, in several years, we'll have a situation similar to the one in publishing regarding the representation of different languages. This means than only a small number of languages will be in use (compared to the several thousands which exist). In this perspective, we believe that the Web — among other parties — should seek to further support minority cultures and languages, particularly for dispersed communities.
Finally, the arrival on the Internet of languages other than English, while requiring true readjustments and providing undeniable enrichment, points out the need for linguistic processing tools capable of effectively managing this situation. These will emerge as the result of research studies and awareness activities in areas such as machine translation, standardization, information location, automatic condensation (summaries), etc."
ML: "What did the use of the Internet bring to the life of CEVEIL?"
CEVEIL: "Let us first mention that the existence of the Web is one of the grounds of existence of CEVEIL, as we concentrate our activities mainly around the set of themes of the language use and processing on the Internet.