Peter Raggett, deputy-head (and then head) of the Central Library of OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), wrote in August 1999: "I think it is incumbent on European organizations and businesses to try and offer websites in three or four languages if resources permit. In this age of globalization and electronic commerce, businesses are finding that they are doing business across many countries. Allowing French, German, Japanese speakers to easily read one's website as well as English speakers will give a business a competitive edge in the domain of electronic trading."
As the internet quickly spread worldwide, companies needed to offer bilingual, trilingual, even plurilingual websites to reach as large an audience as possible, while adapting their content to a given audience, either a country or a linguistic community. Thus the need to internationalize and localize websites, which became a major trend in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with English- language companies and organizations setting up plurilingual websites, in English and other languages, and non-English-language companies and organizations setting up websites in their own language(s) and English.
1999 > BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES IN WORDREFERENCE.COM
[Summary] Michael Kellogg created WordReference.com in 1999. He wrote much later on his website: "I started this site in 1999 in an effort to provide free online bilingual dictionaries and tools to the world. The site has grown gradually ever since to become one of the most- used online dictionaries, and the top online dictionary for its language pairs of English-Spanish, English-French, English-Italian, Spanish-French, and Spanish-Portuguese. It is consistently ranked in the top 500 most-visited websites in the world. I am proud of my history of innovation with dictionaries on the internet. Many of the features such as being able to click any word in a dictionary entry were first implemented by me.” WordReference was also provided high-quality language forums, and lighter versions of some dictionaries for mobile devices.
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Michael Kellogg created WordReference.com in 1999 to offer free online bilingual translation dictionaries.
Much later, Michael wrote on his website: "I started this site in 1999 in an effort to provide free online bilingual dictionaries and tools to the world. The site has grown gradually ever since to become one of the most-used online dictionaries, and the top online dictionary for its language pairs of English-Spanish, English-French, English-Italian, Spanish-French, and Spanish- Portuguese. It is consistently ranked in the top 500 most-visited websites in the world. I am proud of my history of innovation with dictionaries on the internet. Many of the features such as being able to click any word in a dictionary entry were first implemented by me.”
How was the idea behind his project? “The internet has done an incredible job of bringing the world together in the last few years. Of course, one of the greatest barriers has been language. Much of the content is in English and many, many users are reading English-language webpages as a second language. I know from my own experiences with Spanish-language websites that many readers probably understand much of what they are reading, but not every single word”, thus the need for a website offering free online bilingual translation dictionaries.
In 2010, WordReference has also offered a monolingual dictionary in English as well as dictionaries from English to other languages (Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Turkish), and vice versa. For the Spanish language, there was a monolingual dictionary, a dictionary of synonyms, a Spanish-French dictionary and a Spanish-Portuguese dictionary. Conjugation tables were available for French, Italian and Spanish. Monolingual dictionaries were available for German and Russian.
WordReference Mini was a miniature version of the site to be embedded into other sites, for example sites teaching languages online. A mobile device version was available for dictionaries from English to French, Italian and Spanish, and vice versa, with other language pairs to come.