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In December 1995, Yoshi Mikami created the website "The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet", also known as the Logos Home Page or Kotoba Home Page, "to summarize there the brief history, linguistic and phonetic features, writing system and computer processing aspects for each of the six major languages of the world, in English and Japanese".
Yoshi Mikami was a computer scientist at Asia Info Network in Fujisawa, Japan. As a second step, one year after launching his website, he was also the co-author (with Kenji Sekine and Nobutoshi Kohara) of "The Multilingual Web Guide" (Japanese edition), a print book published in August 1997 by O'Reilly Japan, and translated in 1998 into English, French and German.
Yoshi explained in December 1998: "My native tongue is Japanese. Because I had my graduate education in the U.S. and worked in the computer business, I became bilingual in Japanese and American English. I was always interested in languages and different cultures, so I learned some Russian, French and Chinese along the way. In late 1995, I created on the web ‘The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet’ and tried to summarize there the brief history, linguistic and phonetic features, writing system and computer processing aspects for each of the six major languages of the world, in English and Japanese. As I gained more experience, I invited my two associates to help me write a book on viewing, understanding and creating multilingual webpages, which was published in August 1997 as 'The Multilingual Web Guide', in a Japanese edition, the world's first book on such a subject."
As for multilingualism, Yoshi added: "Thousands of years ago, in Egypt, China and elsewhere, people were more concerned about communicating their laws and thoughts not in just one language, but in several. In our modern world, most nation states have each adopted one language for their own use. I predict greater use of different languages and multilingual pages on the internet, not a simple gravitation to American English, and also more creative use of multilingual computer translation. 99% of the websites created in Japan are written in Japanese.”
1995 > GLOBAL REACH, PROMOTING LOCALIZATION
[Summary] Ten years after founding Euro-Marketing Associates, a company based in San Francisco and Paris, Bill Dunlap launched in 1995 Global Reach, a marketing consultancy helping U.S. companies to expand their internet presence into an international framework. This included translating a website into other languages, actively promoting it, and using local online banner advertising to increase local website traffic. Bill Dunlap explained in December 1998: “Promoting your website is at least as important as creating it, if not more important. You should be prepared to spend at least as much time and money in promoting your website as you did in creating it in the first place. With the Global Reach program, you can have it promoted in countries where English is not spoken, and achieve a wider audience… and more sales.”
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In 1995, Bill Dunlap launched Global Reach, a marketing consultancy helping U.S. companies to expand their internet presence into an international framework. This included translating a website into other languages, actively promoting it, and using local online banner advertising to increase local website traffic.
Ten years earlier, Bill Dunlap founded Euro-Marketing Associates, a company based in San Francisco and Paris. He wrote in December 1998: “There are so few people in the U.S. interested in communicating in many languages — most Americans are still under the delusion that the rest of the world speaks English. However, in Europe, the countries are small enough so that an international perspective has been necessary for centuries. (…)