= [Overview]
2000 was a turning point for a multilingual internet, both for
its content and its users. In summer 2000, non-English-speaking
users reached 50%. This percentage went on to increase
steadily: 52.5% in summer 2001, 57% in December 2001, 59.8% in
April 2002, 64.4% in September 2003 - with 34.9% non-English-
speaking Europeans and 29.4% Asians - and 64.2% in March 2004
- with 37.9% non-English-speaking Europeans and 33% Asians
(source: Global Reach). The internet is also a good tool for
minority languages, as stated by Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle, who
teaches computing at the Institute Sabhal Mór Ostaig, located
on the Island of Skye, in Scotland. Caoimhín also maintains the
college website, which is the main site worldwide with
information on Scottish Gaelic, with a bilingual (English,
Gaelic) list of European minority languages. He wrote in May
2001: "Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic spell-
checking, a Gaelic online terminology database. There are more
hits on our website. There is more use of sound. Gaelic radio
(both Scottish and Irish) is now available continuously
worldwide via the internet. A major project has been the
translation of the Opera web-browser into Gaelic - the first
software of this size available in Gaelic."
= "Language nations"
At first, the internet was nearly 100% English. Born in the
United States, it spread in North America before taking over
the whole planet. Then people from all continents began
connecting to the internet and posting webpages in their own
languages. In the 1990s, the percentage of English decreased
from nearly 100% to 85% (reached in 1997 or 1998, depending on
the sources).
In 1997, Babel - a joint initiative from Alis Technologies
(language translation services) and the Internet Society - ran
the first major study relating to distribution of languages on
the web. The results were published in June 1997 on a webpage
named Web Languages Hit Parade. The main languages were English
with 82.3%, German with 4.0%, Japanese with 1.6%, French with
1.5%, Spanish with 1.1%, Swedish with 1.1%, and Italian with
1.0%.
In July 1998, according to Global Reach, a company specializing
in international online marketing, the fastest growing groups
of internet users were non-English-speaking: Spanish-speaking,
22.4%, Japanese-speaking, 12.3%; German-speaking, 14%; and
French-speaking, 10% - with 56 million non-English-speaking
users. More than 80% of all webpages were still in English,
whereas only 6% of the world population spoke English as a
native language (16% spoke Spanish).
Randy Hobler was a consultant in internet marketing for
Globalink, a company specializing in language translation
software and services. He wrote in September 1998: "85% of the
content of the web in 1998 is in English and going down. 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."
Randy also brought up the concept of "language nations":
"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."
Robert Ware created OneLook Dictionaries in April 1996, as a
"fast finder" of words in hundreds of online dictionaries. He
wrote about an experience he had in 1994, that showed the
internet could promote both a common language and
multilingualism: "In 1994, I was working for a college and
trying to install a software package on a particular type of
computer. I located a person who was working on the same
problem and we began exchanging email. Suddenly, it hit me...
the software was written only 30 miles away but I was getting
help from a person half way around the world. Distance and
geography no longer mattered! OK, this is great! But what is it
leading to? I am only able to communicate in English but,
fortunately, the other person could use English as well as
German which was his mother tongue. The internet has removed
one barrier (distance) but with that comes the barrier of
language. It seems that the internet is moving people in two
quite different directions at the same time. The internet
(initially based on English) is connecting people all around
the world. This is further promoting a common language for
people to use for communication. But it is also creating
contact between people of different languages and creates a
greater interest in multilingualism. A common language is great
but in no way replaces this need. So the internet promotes both
a common language *and* multilingualism. The good news is that
it helps provide solutions. The increased interest and need is
creating incentives for people around the world to create
improved language courses and other assistance, and the
internet is providing fast and inexpensive opportunities to
make them available."
The internet could also be a tool to develop a "cultural
identity". During the Symposium on Multimedia Convergence
organized by the International Labor Office (ILO) in January
1997, Shinji Matsumoto, general secretary of the Musicians'
Union of Japan (MUJ), explained: "Japan is quite receptive to
foreign culture and foreign technology. (...) Foreign culture
is pouring into Japan and, in fact, the domestic market is
being dominated by foreign products. Despite this, when it
comes to preserving and further developing Japanese culture,
there has been insufficient support from the government. (...)
With the development of information networks, the earth is
getting smaller and it is wonderful to be able to make cultural
exchanges across vast distances and to deepen mutual
understanding among people. We have to remember to respect
national cultures and social systems."
As the internet quickly spread worldwide, more and more people
in the U.S. realized that, although English may stay the main
international language for exchanges of all kinds, not everyone
in the world reads English and, even so, people prefer to read
information in their own language. To reach as large an
audience as possible, companies and organizations needed to
offer bilingual, trilingual, even multilingual websites, while
adapting their content to a given audience. Thus the need of
both internationalization and localization, which became a
major trend in the following years, not only in the U.S. but in
many countries, where foreign companies set up bilingual
websites - in their language and in English - to reach a wider
audience, and get more clients.
Translation software available on the web was far from perfect,
but was helpful, because instantaneous and free, unlike a high-
quality professional translation. In December 1997, AltaVista,
a leading search engine, was the first to launch such software
with Babel Fish - also called AltaVista Translation -, which
could translate webpages (up to three pages at the same time)
from English into French, German, Italian, Portuguese or
Spanish, and vice versa. The software was developed by Systran,
a company specializing in machine translation. This initiative
was followed by others, with free and/or paid versions on the
web, developed by Alis Technologies, Globalink, Lernout &
Hauspie, IBM (with the WebSphere Translation Server),
Softissimo, Champollion, TMX or Trados.
Brian King, director of the WorldWide Language Institute
(WWLI), brought up the concept of "linguistic democracy" in
September 1998: "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."
Jean-Pierre Cloutier was the editor of "Chroniques de Cybérie",
a weekly French-language online report of internet news. He
wrote in August 1999: "We passed a milestone this summer. Now
more than half the users of the internet live outside the
United States. Next year, more than half of all users will be
non English-speaking, compared with only 5% five years ago.
Isn't that great?"
The internet did pass this second milestone in summer 2000,
with non-English-speaking users reaching 50%. As shown in the
statistics of Global Reach, they were 52.5% in summer 2001, 57%
in December 2001, 59.8% in April 2002, 64.4% in September 2003
(with 34.9% non-English-speaking Europeans and 29.4% Asians),
and 64.2% in March 2004 (with 37.9% non-English-speaking
Europeans and 33% Asians).
= From ASCII to Unicode
Used since the beginning of computing, ASCII (American Standard
Code for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit coded character
set for information interchange in English. It was published in
1968 by ANSI (American National Standards Institute), with an
update in 1977 and 1986. The 7-bit plain ASCII, also called
Plain Vanilla ASCII, is a set of 128 characters with 95
printable unaccented characters (A-Z, a-z, numbers, punctuation
and basic symbols), i.e. the ones that are available on the
English/American keyboard.
With the use of other European languages, extensions of ASCII
(also called ISO-8859 or ISO-Latin) were created as sets of 256
characters to add accented characters as found in French,
Spanish and German, for example ISO 8859-1 (ISO-Latin-1) for
French.
Yoshi Mikami, who lives in Fujisawa, Japan, launched the
bilingual (Japanese, English) website "The Languages of the
World by Computers and the Internet", also known as Logos Home
Page or Kotoba Home Page, in late 1995. Yoshi was the co-author
(with Kenji Sekine and Nobutoshi Kohara) of "The Multilingual
Web Guide" (Japanese edition), a print book published by
O'Reilly Japan in August 1997, and translated in 1998 into
English, French and German.
Yoshi Mikami explained in December 1998: "My native tongue is
Japanese. Because I had my graduate education in the U.S. and
worked in the computer business, I became bilingual in Japanese
and American English. I was always interested in languages and
different cultures, so I learned some Russian, French and
Chinese along the way. In late 1995, I created on the web The
Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet and tried
to summarize there the brief history, linguistic and phonetic
features, writing system and computer processing aspects for
each of the six major languages of the world, in English and
Japanese. As I gained more experience, I invited my two
associates to help me write a book on viewing, understanding
and creating multilingual web pages, which was published in
August 1997 as 'The Multilingual Web Guide', in a Japanese
edition, the world's first book on such a subject."
Yoshi added in the same email interview: "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."
Brian King, director of the WorldWide Language Institute
(WWLI), explained in September 1998: "A pull from non-English-
speaking computer users and a push from technology companies
competing for global markets has made localization a fast
growing area in software and hardware development. This
development has not been as fast as it could have been. The
first step was for ASCII to become Extended ASCII. This meant
that computers could begin to start recognizing the accents and
symbols used in variants of the English alphabet - mostly used
by European languages. But only one language could be displayed
on a page at a time. (...) The most recent development is
Unicode. Although still evolving and only just being
incorporated into the latest software, this new coding system
translates each character into 16 bytes. Whereas 8-byte
Extended ASCII could only handle a maximum of 256 characters,
Unicode can handle over 65,000 unique characters and therefore
potentially accommodate all of the world's writing systems on
the computer. 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."
Ten years later, in 2008, 50% of all the documents available on
the internet were encoded in Unicode, with the other 50%
encoded in ASCII. ASCII is still very useful, especially the
original 7-bit plain ASCII, because it can be read, written,
copied and printed by any text editor or word processor, and it
is the only format compatible with 99% of all hardware and
software.
First published in January 1991, Unicode "provides a unique
number for every character, no matter what the platform, no
matter what the program, no matter what the language" (excerpt
from the website). This double-byte platform-independent
encoding provides a basis for the processing, storage and
interchange of text data in any language, and any modern
software and information technology protocols. Unicode is
maintained by the Unicode Consortium, and is a component of the
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) specifications.
= Language dictionaries
Logos is an international translation company with headquarters
in Modena, Italy. In 1997, Logos had 200 in-house translators
in Modena and 2,500 free-lance translators worldwide, who
processed around 200 texts per day. The company made a bold
move, and decided to put on the web all the linguistic tools
used by its translators, for the internet community to freely
use them as well. The linguistic tools were the Logos
Dictionary, a multilingual dictionary with 7 billion words (in
fall 1998); the Logos Wordtheque, a multilingual library with
300 billion words extracted from translated novels, technical
manuals and other texts; the Logos Linguistic Resources, a
database of 500 glossaries; and the Logos Universal Conjugator,
a database for verbs in 17 languages.
When interviewed by Annie Kahn on December 7, 1997 for the
French daily Le Monde, Rodrigo Vergara, head of Logos,
explained: "We wanted all our translators to have access to the
same translation tools. So we made them available on the
internet, and while we were at it we decided to make the site
open to the public. This made us extremely popular, and also
gave us a lot of exposure. This move has in fact attracted many
customers, and also allowed us to widen our network of
translators, thanks to contacts made in the wake of the
initiative."
In the same article, Annie Kahn wrote: "The Logos site is much
more than a mere dictionary or a collection of links to other
online dictionaries. The cornerstone is the document search
program, which processes a corpus of literary texts available
free of charge on the web. If you search for the definition or
the translation of a word ('didactique', for example), you get
not only the answer sought, but also a quote from one of the
literary works containing the word (in our case, an essay by
Voltaire). All it takes is a click on the mouse to access the
whole text or even to order the book, including in foreign
translations, thanks to a partnership agreement with the famous
online bookstore Amazon.com. However, if no text containing the
required word is found, the program acts as a search engine,
sending the user to other web sources containing this word. In
the case of certain words, you can even hear the pronunciation.
If there is no translation currently available, the system
calls on the public to contribute. Everyone can make
suggestions, after which Logos translators check the suggested
translations they receive."
Robert Beard, a language teacher at Bucknell University (in
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania), founded the website "A Web of Online
Dictionaries" (WOD) in 1995, and included it then in a larger
project, yourDictionary.com, that he cofounded in early 2000.
He wrote in January 2000: "The new website is an index of
1,200+ dictionaries in more than 200 languages. Besides the
WOD, the new website includes a word-of-the-day-feature, word
games, a language chat room, the old 'Web of Online Grammars'
(now expanded to include additional language resources), the
'Web of Linguistic Fun', multilingual dictionaries; specialized
English dictionaries; thesauri and other vocabulary aids;
language identifiers and guessers, and other features;
dictionary indices. yourDictionary.com will hopefully be the
premiere language portal and the largest language resource site
on the web. It is now actively acquiring dictionaries and
grammars of all languages with a particular focus on endangered
languages. It is overseen by a blue ribbon panel of linguistic
experts from all over the world."
yourDictionary.com wants to be the premiere portal for all
languages without any exception, and as such offers a specific
section called Endangered Language Repository. Robert Beard
explained in the same email interview: "Languages that are
endangered are primarily languages without writing systems at
all (only 1/3 of the world's 6,000+ languages have writing
systems). I still do not see the web contributing to the loss
of language identity and still suspect it may, in the long run,
contribute to strengthening it. More and more Native Americans,
for example, are contacting linguists, asking them to write
grammars of their language and help them put up dictionaries.
For these people, the web is an affordable boon for cultural
expression."
The 6,700 languages of our planet are catalogued in "The
Ethnologue: Languages of the World", an encyclopedia published
by SIL International (SIL: Summer Institute of Linguistics).
Barbara Grimes was the editor of the 8th to 14th editions,
1971-2000. She wrote in January 2000: "The Ethnologue is a
catalog of the languages of the world, with information about
where they are spoken, an estimate of the number of speakers,
what language family they are in, alternate names, names of
dialects, other socio-linguistic and demographic information,
dates of published Bibles, a name index, a language family
index, and language maps." The Ethnologue is freely available
on the web. The print version and CD-ROM can be bought online.
= Minority languages
Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle teaches computing - through the Gaelic
language - at the Institute Sabhal Mór Ostaig, located on the
Island of Skye, in Scotland. He also maintains the bilingual
(English, Gaelic) college website, which is the main site
worldwide with information on Scottish Gaelic, as well as the
webpage European Minority Languages, a list of minority
languages by alphabetic order and by language family. He wrote
in May 2001: "There has been a great expansion in the use of
information technology in our college. Far more computers, more
computing staff, flat screens. Students do everything by
computer, use Gaelic spell-checking, and a Gaelic online
terminology database. There are more hits on our website. There
is more use of sound. Gaelic radio (both Scottish and Irish) is
now available continuously worldwide via the internet. 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 the internet and 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
globalisation will greatly speed their demise. If people do
care about preserving them, the internet will be a tremendous
help."
Guy Antoine is the founder of Windows on Haiti, a reference
website about Haitian culture. He wrote in November 1999: "In
Windows on Haiti, the primary language of the site is English,
but one will equally find a center of lively discussion
conducted in 'Kreyòl'. In addition, one will find documents
related to Haiti in French, in the old colonial Creole, and I
am open to publishing others in Spanish and other languages. 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."
Guy added in June 2001: "Kreyòl is the only national language
of Haiti, and one of its two official languages, the other
being French. It is hardly a minority language in the Caribbean
context, since it is spoken by eight to ten million people.
(...) I have taken the promotion of Kreyòl as a personal cause,
since that language is the strongest of bonds uniting all
Haitians, in spite of a small but disproportionately
influential Haitian elite's disdainful attitude to adopting
standards for the writing of Kreyòl and supporting the
publication of books and official communications in that
language. For instance, there was recently a two-week book
event in Haiti's Capital and it was promoted as 'Livres en
folie' ('A mad feast for books'). Some 500 books from Haitian
authors were on display, among which one could find perhaps 20
written in Kreyòl. This is within the context of France's major
push to celebrate Francophony among its former colonies. This
plays rather well in Haiti, but directly at the expense of
Creolophony. What I have created in response to those attitudes
are two discussion forums on my website, Windows on Haiti, held
exclusively in Kreyòl. One is for general discussions on just
about everything but obviously more focused on Haiti's current
socio-political problems. The other is reserved only to debates
of writing standards for Kreyòl. Those debates have been quite
spirited and have met with the participation of a number of
linguistic experts. The uniqueness of these forums is their
non-academic nature."
= Translations
Henk Slettenhaar is a professor in communication technologies
at Webster University, Geneva, Switzerland. He has regularly
insisted on the need of bilingual websites, in the original
language and in English. He wrote in December 1998: "I see
multilingualism as a very important issue. Local communities
that are on the web should principally use the local language
for their information. If they want to present it to the world
community as well, it should be in English too. I see a real
need for bilingual websites. I am delighted there are so many
offerings in the original language now. I much prefer to read
the original with difficulty than getting a bad translation."
Henk added in August 1999: "There are two main categories of
websites in my opinion. The first one is the global outreach
for business and information. Here the language is definitely
English first, with local versions where appropriate. The
second one is local information of all kinds in the most remote
places. If the information is meant for people of an ethnic
and/or language group, it should be in that language first,
with perhaps a summary in English. We have seen lately how
important these local websites are - in Kosovo and Turkey, to
mention just the most recent ones. People were able to get
information about their relatives through these sites."
Jean-Pierre Cloutier was the editor of "Chroniques de Cybérie",
a weekly French-language online report of internet news. Jean-
Pierre wrote in August 1999: "The web is going to grow in non-
English-speaking regions. So we have to take into account the
technical aspects of the medium if we want to reach these 'new'
users. I think it is a pity there are so few translations of
important documents and essays published on the web - from
English into other languages and vice versa. (...) In the same
way, the recent spreading of the internet in new regions raises
questions which would be good to read about. When will Spanish-
speaking communication theorists and those speaking other
languages be translated?"
Marcel Grangier is the head of the French Section of the Swiss
Federal Government's Central Linguistic Services, which means
he is in charge of organizing translations into French for the
Swiss government. He wrote in January 1999: "We can see
multilingualism on the internet as a happy and irreversible
inevitability. So we have to laugh at the doomsayers who only
complain about the supremacy of English. Such supremacy is not
wrong in itself, because it is mainly based on statistics (more
PCs per inhabitant, more people speaking English, etc.). The
answer is not to 'fight' English, much less whine about it, but
to build more sites in other languages. As a translation
service, we also recommend that websites be multilingual. The
increasing number of languages on the internet is inevitable
and can only boost multicultural exchanges. For this to happen
in the best possible circumstances, we still need to develop
tools to improve compatibility. Fully coping with accents and
other characters is only one example of what can be done."