Marie Lebert

“ With the invention of the printing press, the access barrier was overcome — now *anyone* with money to buy a book can read Seneca and Moses. And today, information access becomes almost instantaneous, globally; you can read Seneca and Moses from your computer, without even knowing who they are or how to find out what they wrote; simply open AltaVista and search for 'Seneca'. This is a phenomenal leap in the development of connections between people and cultures. Look how today's Internet kids are incorporating the Web in their lives. ”

“ Language will become even more important than it already is when the entire planet can communicate with everyone else (via the Web, chat, games, e-mail, and whatever future applications haven't even been invented yet) , but I don't know if this will lead to stronger language ties, or a consolidation of languages until only a few, or even just one remain. One thing I think is certain is that the Internet will forever be a record of our diversity, including language diversity, even if that diversity fades away. ”

“ Whereas 'mother-tongue education' was deemed a human right for every child in the world by a UNESCO report in the early '50s, 'mother-tongue surfing' may very well be the Information Age equivalent. If the Internet is to truly become the Global Network that it is promoted as being, then all users, regardless of language background, should have access to it. To keep the Internet as the preserve of those who, by historical accident, practical necessity, or political privilege, happen to know English, is unfair to those who don't. ”

“ We are rapidly reaching the point where highly accurate machine translation of text and speech will be so common as to be embedded in computer platforms, and even in chips in various ways. At that point, and as the growth of the Web slows, the accuracy of language translation hits 98% plus, and the saturation of language pairs has covered the vast majority of the market, language transparency (any-language-to-any-language communication) will be too limiting a vision for those selling this technology. ”

“ This trend is driven not only by more websites and users in non-English-speaking countries, but by increasing localization of company and organization sites, and increasing use of machine translation to/from various languages to translate websites.
Because the Internet has no national boundaries, the organization of users is bounded by other criteria driven by the medium itself. In terms of multilingualism, you have virtual communities, for example, of what I call 'Language Nations'... all those people on the Internet wherever they may be, for whom a given language is their native language. ”

“ Although a multilingual Web may be desirable on moral and ethical grounds, such high ideals are not enough to make it other than a reality on a small-scale. As well as the appropriate technology being available so that the non-English speaker can go, there is the impact of 'electronic commerce' as a major force that may make multilingualism the most natural path for cyberspace.
Sellers of products and services in the virtual global marketplace into which the Internet is developing must be prepared to deal with a virtual world that is just as multilingual as the physical world. ”

“ As you may have read, I think 'THE WEB' is a political, not a technological concept. A civilization is possible with extremely advanced computers, but no interconnection. The idea that there should be ONE WEB is derived from the liberal tradition of the single open, preferably global market.
I already suggested that the Internet should simply be broken up, and that Europe should cut the links with the US, and build a systematically incompatible net for Europe. As soon as you imagine the possibility of multiple nets, the language issues you list in your study are often irrelevant. ”

“ In his e-mail of September 23, 1998, Steven Krauwer, ELSNET coordinator, explained:
"— as a European citizen I think that multilingualism on the Web is absolutely essential, as in the long run I don't think that it is a healthy situation when only those who have a reasonable command of English can fully exploit the benefits of the Web;
— as a researcher (specialized in machine translation) I see multilingualism as a major challenge: how can we ensure that all information on the Web is accessible to everybody, irrespective of language differences. ”

“ Through language engineering we can find ways of living comfortably with technology. Our knowledge of language can be used to develop systems that recognise speech and writing, understand text well enough to select information, translate between different languages, and generate speech as well as the printed world.
By applying such technologies we have the ability to extend the current limits of our use of language. Language enabled products will become an essential and integral part of everyday life. ”

“ The Internet Dictionary Project began in 1995 in an effort to provide a noticeably lacking resource to the Internet community and to computing in general — free translating dictionaries. Not only is it helpful to the on-line community to have access to dictionary searches at their fingertips via the World Wide Web, it also sponsors the growth of computer software which can benefit from such dictionaries — from translating programs to spelling-checkers to language-education guides and more. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There was an initial fear that the Web posed a threat to multilingualism on the Web, since HTML and other programming languages are based on English and since there are simply more websites in English than any other language. However, my websites indicate that multilingualism is very much alive and the Web may, in fact, serve as a vehicle for preserving many endangered languages. I now have links to dictionaries in 150 languages and grammars of 65 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. ”

“ An extension of (local) popularization is the export of information technology around the world. Popularization has now occurred on a global scale and English is no longer necessarily the lingua franca of the user. Perhaps there is no true lingua franca, but only the individual languages of the users. One thing is certain — it is no longer necessary to understand English to use a computer, nor it is necessary to have a degree in computer science. ”

“ French is not only the language of 49 countries and 500 million inhabitants in the world, it is also the second international language used in international organizations. Despite the real and alleged pressure of the English-speaking community, French-speaking people insist on their language being given a fair position in the world, and receiving the same consideration given to other main languages of communication, such as English, Arabic, Chinese or Spanish. ”

“ 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. ”

“ People will write their own language for several reasons — convenience, secrecy, and local applicability — but that does not mean that other people are not interested in reading what they have to say! This is especially true for companies involved in technology watch (say, a computer company that wants to know, daily, all the Japanese newspaper and other articles that pertain to what they make) or some Government Intelligence agencies (the people who provide the most up-to-date information for use by your government officials in making policy, etc.) ”

“ Popularization of information technology
Computer technology has traditionally been the sole domain of a 'techie' elite, fluent in both complex programming languages and in English — the universal language of science and technology. Computers were never designed to handle writing systems that couldn't be translated into ASCII. There wasn't much room for anything other than the 26 letters of the English alphabet in a coding system that originally couldn't even recognize acute accents and umlauts — not to mention nonalphabetic systems like Chinese. ”

“ The Internet is here to stay. The arrival of languages other than English to this medium also is irreversible. Therefore it is necessary to take these new facts into consideration from an economic, social, political, cultural, etc., point of view. Sectors such as advertising, vocational training, work in groups or within networks and knowledge management, will consequently have to evolve. As we mentioned above, it brings us back to the necessary development of really effective technologies and tools which will further exchanges in a really multilingual global village... ”

“ Linguistic pluralism and diversity are not obstacles to the free circulation of men, ideas, goods and services, as would like to suggest some objective allies, consciously or not, of the dominant language and culture. ”

“ So now the tools are more or less in place. They are still not perfect, but at last we can at least surf the Web in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and numerous other languages that don't use the Western alphabet. As the Internet spreads to parts of the world where English is rarely used — such as China, for example, it is natural that Chinese, and not English, will be the preferred choice for interacting with it. For the majority of the users in China, their mother tongue will be the only choice. ”

“ This was back before Netscape even existed — Mosaic was almost the only Web browser, and web pages were little more than hyperlinked text documents. As browsers and users mature, I don't think there will be any currently spoken language that won't have a niche on the Web, from Native American languages to Middle Eastern dialects, as well as a plethora of 'dead' languages that will have a chance to find a new audience with scholars and others alike on-line. ”

“ As the Web quickly spreads worldwide, more and more operators of English-language sites which are concerned by the internationalization of the Web recognize that, although English may be the main international language for exchanges of all kinds, not everyone in the world reads English.
Since December 1997 any Internet surfer can use the AltaVista Translation service, which translates English web pages (up to three pages at the same time) into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, and vice versa. The Internet surfer can also buy and use Web translation software. ”

“ There are many good reasons for taking the on-line international market seriously. "Global Reach" is a means for you to extend your website to many countries, speak to on-line visitors in their own language and reach on-line markets there."
In his e-mail of December 11, 1998, he also explains what the use of the
Internet brought in his professional life:
"Since 1981, when my professional life started, I've been involved with bringing American companies in Europe. ”

“ The counter-attack is not to 'fight against English' and even less to whine about it, but to increase sites in other languages. As a translation service, we also recommend the multilingualism of websites."
ML: "What did the use of the Internet bring to your professional life?"
MG: "To work without the Internet is simply impossible now — as well as all the tools used (e-mail, electronic press, services for translators) , Internet is for us an essential and inexhaustible source of information in what I would call the 'non-structured sector' of the Web. ”

“ The fact that there are many more Internet surfers in the US and Canada than in any other country is due to different factors — these countries are among the leaders in the latest computing and communication technologies, and hardware and software, as well as local phone communications, are much cheaper there than in the rest of the world. ”

“ We consider e-text to be a new medium, with no real relationship to paper, other than presenting the same material, but I don't see how paper can possibly compete once people each find their own comfortable way to e-texts, especially in schools. [...] My own personal goal is to put 10,000 e-texts on the Net, and if I can get some major support, I would like to expand that to 1,000,000 and to also expand our potential audience for the average e-text from 1.x% of the world population to over 10%... ”

“ According to Global Reach, the fastest growing groups of Web newbies are non-English-speaking: Spanish, 22.4 percent; Japanese, 12.3 percent; German, 14 percent; and French, 10 percent. An estimated 55.7 million people access the Web whose native language is not English. [...] Only 6 percent of the world population speaks English as a native language (16 percent speak Spanish) , while about 80 percent of all web pages are in English. ”