As explained in 1998 on the bilingual English-Japanese website: "UNL is a language that — with its companion 'enconverter' and 'deconverter' software — enables communication among peoples of differing native languages. It will reside, as a plug-in for popular web browsers, on the internet, and will be compatible with standard network servers. The technology will be shared among the member states of the United Nations. Any person with access to the internet will be able to 'enconvert' text from any native language of a member state into UNL. Just as easily, any UNL text can be 'deconverted' from UNL into native languages. United Nations University's UNL Center will work with its partners to create and promote the UNL software, which will be compatible with popular network servers and computing platforms."
At the time, 120 researchers worldwide were working on a multilingual project in 16 languages (Arabic, Brazilian, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Mongolian, Russian, Spanish, Swahiki, Thai). After things worked with 16 languages, other UN languages would be included in 2000.
UNL was meant to become the HTML of linguistic content. Possible applications would be multilingual email, multilingual information, active dictionaries for reading foreign languages online, and machine translation for navigating the web and monitoring websites.
The project was also important from a political and cultural point of view, as the first project building up tools for all languages on the internet, i.e. main languages as well as minority languages.
The UNDL Foundation (UNDL: Universal Networking Digital Language) was founded in January 2001 to develop and promote the UNL project, and became a partner of the United Nations.
The definition of UNL has evolved over the years. According to the UNDL Foundation’s website in 2010: “UNL is a computer language that enables computers to process information and knowledge. It is designed to replicate the functions of natural languages. Using UNL, people can describe all information and knowledge conveyed by natural languages for computers. As a result, computers can intercommunicate through UNL and process information and knowledge using UNL, thus providing people with a Linguistic Infrastructure (LI) in computers and the internet for distributing, receiving and understanding multilingual information. Such multilingual information can be accessed by natural languages through the UNL System. UNL, as a language for expressing information and knowledge described in natural languages, has all the components corresponding to that of a natural language.”
2001 > A MARKET FOR LANGUAGE TRANSLATION SOFTWARE
[Summary] The development of electronic commerce boosted language translation software, products and services targeting the general public, language professionals, and companies localizing their websites. The software, products and services were developed for example by Alis Technologies, Globalink, Lernout & Hauspie, Softissimo and IBM. In March 2001, IBM embarked on a growing translation market with a high-end professional product, the WebSphere Translation Server. The software could instantly translate webpages, emails and chats from/into several languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish). It could process 500 words per second and add terminology to the software. Computer-assisted translation (CAT) software were developed for professional translators, based on “translation memory” with terminology processing in real time, for example Wordfast, created in 1999 by Yves Champollion. Worldfast could be used on any platform (Windows, Mac, Linux), and was compatible with the software of other key players like IBM and SDL Trados.
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The development of electronic commerce boosted language translation software, products and services targeting the general public, language professionals, and companies localizing their websites.