Marie Lebert

“ I do not offer any sort of translation, but multilingualism is alive and well at the site, and I predict that this will increasingly become the norm throughout the web. (...)
The internet can serve, first of all, as a repository of useful information on minority languages that might otherwise vanish without leaving a trace. Beyond that, I believe that it provides an incentive for people to learn languages associated with the cultures about which they are attempting to gather information. One soon realizes that the language of a people is an essential and inextricable part of its culture. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When exactly is a language considered as endangered? As explained by UNESCO on the interactive altas’ website: “A language is endangered when its speakers cease to use it, use it in fewer and fewer domains, use fewer of its registers and speaking styles, and/or stop passing it on to the next generation. No single factor determines whether a language is endangered.” ”

“ Founder of Euro-Marketing Associates and its virtual branch Global Reach, Bill Dunlap championed the assets of e-commerce in Europe among his fellow compatriots in the U.S., promoting the internationalization and localization of their websites. 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." ”

“ For Brian King, one factor contributing to the development of a multilingual internet is the “competition for a chunk of the 'global market' by major industry players”, with “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. ”

“ To say that the internet is spurring multilingualism is a bit of a misconception, in my opinion — it is communication that is spurring multilingualism and cross-cultural exchange, the internet is only the latest mode of communication which has made its way down to the (more-or-less) common person. (...) Language will become even more important than it already is when the entire planet can communicate with everyone else (via the web, chat, games, email, and whatever future applications haven't even been invented yet) . ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. Thus, the Spanish Language nation includes not only Spanish and Latin American users, but millions of Hispanic users in the U.S., as well as odd places like Spanish-speaking Morocco. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In 2000, the internet was multilingual, with half of its users having a mother tongue other than English, but the language barrier was far from gone. If any language was now available on the web, many users were monolingual, and even plurilingual users couldn’t read all languages. Bridges were needed between language communities to improve the flow of information in other languages, including by offering better translation software and by offering tools for all languages, and not only the dominant ones. ”

“ It is a vehicle for culture, and the first vector of culture is language. The more languages there are on the net, the more cultures will be represented there. I don't think we should give in to the kneejerk temptation to translate webpages into a largely universal language. Cultural exchanges will only be real if we are prepared to meet with the other culture in a genuine way. And this effort involves understanding the other culture's language. This is very idealistic of course. In practice, when I am monitoring, I curse Norwegian or Brazilian websites where there isn't any English. ”

“ A language disappears when its speakers disappear or when they shift to speaking another language — most often, a larger language used by a more powerful group. Languages are threatened by external forces such as military, economic, religious, cultural or educational subjugation, or by internal forces such as a community’s negative attitude towards its own language. ”

“ 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 non- alphabetic systems like Chinese. But tradition has been turned upside down. Technology has been popularized. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A major project has been the translation of the Opera web-browser into Gaelic — the first software of this size available in Gaelic."
What about endangered languages? "I would emphasize the point that as regards the future of endangered languages, the internet speeds everything up. If people don't care about preserving languages, the internet and accompanying globalization will greatly speed their demise. If people do care about preserving them, the internet will be a tremendous help." ”

“ 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. There are many good reasons for taking the online international market seriously. Global Reach is a means for you to extend your website to many countries, speak to online visitors in their own language and reach online markets there. ”

“ According to Tim McKenna, a writer and philosopher interviewed in October 2000: "When software gets good enough for people to chat or talk on the web in real time in different languages, then we will see a whole new world appear before us. ”

“ Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter, of course, but also tens of thousands of others. The web 2.0 may begin to fulfill the dream of Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web in 1990, and wrote in an essay dated April 1998: "The dream behind the web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. ”

“ The internet can greatly help minority languages, but this will not happen by itself. It will only happen if people want to maintain the language as an aim in itself. (c) The web is very useful for delivering language lessons, and there is a big demand for this. (d) The Unicode (ISO 10646) character set standard is very important and will greatly assist in making the Internet more multilingual.”
How about the Gaelic language? Caoimhín wrote in May 2001: "Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic spell-checking, a Gaelic online terminology database. ”

“ The UNDL Foundation (UNDL: Universal Networking Digital Language) was founded in January 2001 to develop and promote the UNL (Universal Networking Language) project.
The UNL project was launched in 1996 as a major digital metalanguage project by the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) of the United Nations University (UNU) in Tokyo, Japan.
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. ”

“ Robert Ware launched OneLook Dictionaries in April 1996 as a "fast finder" in hundreds of online dictionaries covering various topics: business, computer/internet, medical, miscellaneous, religion, science, sports, technology, general and slang. He wrote in September 1998: "On the personal side, I was almost entirely in contact with people who spoke one language and did not have much incentive to expand language abilities. Being in contact with the entire world has a way of changing that. ”