Multilingualism

“ Just as for any other non-English language-based culture, the French wish to stand up for their own language as well as for multilingualism and the diversity of people and culture.
At present it is important for any language to be represented through websites in its own language, with the possibility for Internet surfers to study it in a dynamic way through self-taught programs, language dictionaries, or linguistic databases. ”

“ But the Internet will only be the medium by which this information is carried; like the paper on which a book is written, the Internet itself adds very little to the content of information, but adds tremendously to its value in its ability to communicate that information. 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. ”

“ Stressing the value of interculturalism and multilingualism and considering that the protection and encouragement of regional or minority languages should not be to the detriment of the official languages and the need to learn them ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Computational Linguistics and the Journal of the Society of Natural Language
Processing of Japan.
*Interview of August 27, 1998
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
In the context of information retrieval (IR) and automated text summarization (SUM) , multilingualism on the Web is another complexifying factor. 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! ”

“ Although English is still the most important language used on the web, and the internet in general, I believe that multilingualism is an inevitable part of the future direction of cyberspace. Here are some of the important developments that I see as making a multilingual web become a reality:
1. 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ My professional life is currently completely separate from my Internet life. Professionally, I'm a computer programmer/techie — I find it challenging and it pays the bills. On-line, my work has been with making language information available to more people through a couple of my Web-based projects. While I'm not multilingual, nor even bilingual, myself, I see an importance to language and multilingualism that I see in very few other areas. The Internet has allowed me to reach millions of people and help them find what they're looking for, something I'm glad to do. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The increase in the number of languages on the Internet is inevitable, and can only be a benefit for multicultural exchanges. For the exchanges to happen in an optimal environment, it is still necesssary to develop tools which will improve compatibility — the complete management of diacritics is only one example of what can be done. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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... ”

“ The next development will be 'transcultural, transnational transparency', in which other aspects of human communication, commerce and transactions beyond language alone will come into play. For example, gesture has meaning, facial movement has meaning and this varies among societies. ”

“ This is a difficult enough task in an English-speaking environment. If we add in the complexities of interacting in a multilingual/multicultural cyberspace, then the task becomes even more demanding. As well as competition, there is also the necessity for cooperation — perhaps more so than ever before."
The seeds of cooperation across the Internet have certainly already been sown. Our NetGlos Project has depended on the goodwill of volunteer translators from Canada, U.S., Austria, Norway, Belgium, Israel, Portugal, Russia, Greece, Brazil, New Zealand and other countries. ”

“ Almost inevitably with travel, with transport communications, with every condition of human convenience insisting upon it, formally or informally a bi-lingual compromise will come into operation, and to my mind at least the chances seem even that French will emerge on the upper hand. Unless, indeed, that great renascence of the English-speaking peoples should, after all, so overwhelmingly occur as to force this European city to be tri-lingual, and prepare the way by which the whole world may at last speak together in one tongue. ”

“ By the middle of the twentieth century, in all probability, English will be its dominant speech; and the English-speaking peoples, a heterogeneous conglomerate of all nationalities, will control between them the destinies of mankind. Spanish will be the language of half the populous southern hemisphere. Russian will spread over a moiety of Asia. Chinese, Malay, Arabic, will divide among themselves the less civilised parts of Africa and the East. But French, German, and Italian will be insignificant and dwindling European dialects, as numerically unimportant as Flemish or Danish in our own day. ”

“ All other civilized nations would be bilingual; they would possess the key not only to their own literature, but to a great foreign literature with all the new horizons that a foreign literature opens out. The English-speaking countries alone would be furnished with only one language, and would have no stimulus to [362] acquire any other language, for no other language would be of any practical use to them. All foreigners would be in a position to bring to the English-speaking man whatever information they considered good for him. ”

“ It is desirable and quite possible to make all civilized peoples bilingual, for of course we should not expect anywhere to see a foreign language supplant the native tongue. It is not alone to facilitate intercourse and give a sense of solidarity that the possession of an universal language is to be desired. We think quite as much of the impetus thus given to the production of an universal literature, in which there will be expressed not only ideas about the world, but moods which will not be found expressed in national literatures at all. ”

“ There is an idea and fear, it seems, that any promotion of minor languages may be detrimental to national integration. This idea is not uncommon in people who have no experience or professional knowledge of multilingual societies. ”

“ We should have to reckon with the tendency of languages to absorb so many foreign traits, that we can no longer speak of a single origin, and that it would be arbitrary whether we associate a language with one or the other of the contributing stocks. In other words, the whole theory of an “Ursprache” for every group of modern languages, must be held in abeyance until we can prove that these languages go back to a single stock and that they have not originated, to a large extent, by the process of acculturation. ”

“ Most of the European languages, as we now see, are derived from one common stock, more archaic than any of them. No one would now trace a French word directly to that old Indo-European root, without going first to the Latin; and so with every other language belonging to the same group. Each nation has put the seal of its own individuality on its language, which it has moulded and shaped according to its own physiological and psychical faculties. ”

“ Many of the reformers and most of their disciples imagined ‘translation’ to be the root of the evil, and so translation in every shape or form was banned; there must be no bilingualism at all, and so the mother-tongue must be excluded from the course, the lessons must be conducted entirely in the foreign language. ”

“ Whether, as Max Müller and Bunsen think, all languages have grown from one stock, or whether, as some philologists say, they have grown from two or more stocks, it is clear that since large families of languages, as the Indo-European, are of one parentage, they have become distinct through a process of continuous divergence. The same diffusion over the Earth’s surface which has led to the differentiation of the race, has simultaneously led to a differentiation of their speech: a truth which we see further illustrated in each nation by the peculiarities of dialect found in separate districts. ”