worked in the computer business, I became bilingual Japanese/American English. I
was always interested in different languages and 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 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 write
a book on viewing, understanding and creating the multilingual web pages, which
was published in August, 1997, as "The Multilingual Web Guide" (see its support
page) in the Japanese edition, the world's first book on such a subject.
Thousands of years ago, in Egypt, China and elsewhere, people were more
conscious about communicating their laws and thoughts not in just one language,
but in different languages. In our modern world, each nation state has adopted
more or less one language for its own use. I see in the future of the Internet a
greater use of different languages and multilingual pages, not a simple
gravitation to American English, and a more creative use of multilingual
computer translation. Ninety nine percent of the Webs created in Japan are
written in Japanese!"
Maintained on the website of the College Sabhal Mór Ostaig, Island of Skye,
Scotland, by Caoimhín P. Ó Donnaíle, European Minority Languages is a list of
minority languages by alphabetic order and by language family. The site also
gives links to other sites dealing with the same subject worldwide.
Caoimhín P. Ó Donnaíle wrote in her e-mail of August 18, 1998:
"-- The Internet has contributed and will contribute to the wildfire spread of
English as a world language.
-- 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.
-- The Web is very useful for delivering language lessons, and there is a big
demand for this.
-- The Unicode (ISO 10646) character set standard is very important and will
greatly assist in making the Internet more multilingual."
3.3. Dictionaries and Glossaries
There are more and more on-line dictionaries. Let us give three examples
(English, French and multilingual).
In Merriam-Webster Online: the Language Center, a main publisher of English
dictionaries gives free access to a collection of on-line resources. The goal is
to help track down definitions, spellings, pronunciations, synonyms, vocabulary
exercises, and other key facts about words and language. The main on-line
resources are: WWWebster Dictionary, WWebster Thesaurus, Webster's Third (a
lexical landmark), Guide to International Business Communications, Vocabulary
Builder (with interactive vocabulary quizzes), and the Barnhart Dictionary
Companion (hot new words).
The Dictionnaire francophone en ligne is the web version of the Dictionnaire
universel francophone, published by Hachette, a major French publisher, and the
Agence universitaire de la Francophonie (AUPELF-UREF) (University Agency for
Francophony), which presents the standard French and the French words and
expressions used in the five continents.
The Logos Dictionary is a multilingual dictionary with 8 million entry words in
all languages. Logos, an international translation company based in Modena,
Italy, gives free access to the linguistic tools used by its translators: 200
translators in its headquarters and 2,500 translators on-line all over the
world, who process around 200 texts per day. Apart from the Logos Dictionary,
these tools include: the Wordtheque, a word-by-word multilingual library with a
massive database (325 million words) containing multilingual novels, technical
literature and translated texts; Linguistic Resources, a database of 536
glossaries; and the Universal Conjugator, a database for conjugation of verbs in
17 languages.
In Les mots pour le dire, an article of the French daily newspaper Le Monde of
December 7, 1997, Annie Kahn wrote:
"The Logos site is much more than a mere dictionary or a collection of links to
other on-line dictionaries. A cornerstone of the system is the document search
software, 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, thanks to a partnership agreement with Amazon.com, the
well-known on-line book shop. Foreign translations are also available. If
however no text containing the required word is found, the system acts as a
search engine, sending the user to other websites concerning the term in
question. 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 their own suggestion, after which Logos
translators and the company verify the translations forwarded."
In the same article, Rodrigo Vergara, the 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. In fact the operation attracted a great number of
customers, and also allowed us to widen our network of translators, thanks to
the contacts made in the wake of this initiative."
The dictionary directories are invaluable tools for linguists, such as
Dictionnaires électroniques (Electronic Dictionaries), OneLook Dictionaries and
A Web of Online Dictionaries.
Dictionnaires électroniques (Electronic Dictionaries) is an extensive list of
electronic dictionaries prepared by the Section française des Services
linguistiques centraux (SLC-f) (French Section of the Central Linguistic
Services) of the Swiss Federal Administration, and classified into five main
sections: abbreviations and acronyms; monolingual dictionaries; bilingual
dictionaries; multilingual dictionaries; and geographical information. The
search of a dictionary is also possible by key-words.
Marcel Grangier, head of this section, answered my questions in his e-mail of
January 14, 1999.
ML: "How do you see multilingualism on the Internet?"
MG: "Multilingualism on the Internet can be seen as a happy and above all
irreversible inevitability. In this perspective we have to make fun of the wet
blankets who only speak to complain about the supremacy of English. This
supremacy is not wrong in itself, inasmuch as it is the result of mainly
statistical facts (more PCs per inhabitant, more English-speaking people, etc.).
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. For example, when the answer to a
translation problem can't be found in websites presenting information in an
organized way, in most cases search engines allow us to find the missing link
somewhere on the network."
ML: "How do you see the future of Internet-related activities as regards
languages?"
MG: "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."
Provided as a free service since April 1996 by Study Technologies, Englewood,
Colorado, OneLook Dictionaries, by Robert Ware, is the fastest finder for more
than 2 million words in 425 dictionaries in various fields: business,
computer/Internet, medical, miscellaneous, religion, science, sports,
technology, general, and slang.
In his e-mail of September 2, 1998, Robert Ware explained:
"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. And changing it for
the better! [...] I have been slow to start including non-English dictionaries
(partly because I am monolingual). But you will now find a few included."
A Web of Online Dictionaries, by Robert Beard, is an index of more than 800
on-line dictionaries in 150 languages, and other tools: multilingual
dictionaries; specialized English dictionaries; thesauri and other vocabulary
aids; language identifiers and guessers; an index of dictionary indices; a Web
of on-line grammars; and a Web of linguistic fun (materials about linguistics
for non-specialists).
Robert Beard answered my questions in his e-mail of September 1, 1998.
ML: "How do you see multilingualism on the Web?"
RB: "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.
Moreover, the new attention paid by browser developers to the different
languages of the world will encourage even more websites in different
languages."
ML: "What did the use of the Internet bring to your professional life?"
RB: "As a language teacher, the Web represents a plethora of new resources
produced by the target culture, new tools for delivering lessons (interactive
Java and Shockwave exercises) and testing, which are available to students any
time they have the time or interest -- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is also
an almost limitless publication outlet for my colleagues and I, not to mention
my institution."
ML: "How do you see the future of Internet-related activities as regards
languages?"
RB: "Ultimately all course materials, including lecture notes, exercises, moot
and credit testing, grading, and interactive exercises far more effective in
conveying concepts that we have not even dreamed of yet. The Web will be an
encyclopedia of the world by the world for the world. There will be no
information or knowledge that anyone needs that will not be available. The major
hindrance to international and interpersonal understanding, personal and
institutional enhancement, will be removed. It would take a wilder imagination
than mine to predict the effect of this development on the nature of humankind."
Initiated by the WorldWide Language Institute, NetGlos (The Multilingual
Glossary of Internet Terminology) is currently being compiled from 1995 as a
voluntary, collaborative project by a number of translators and other
professionals. Versions for the following languages are being prepared: Chinese,
Croatian, English, Dutch/Flemish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Maori,
Norwegian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Brian King, director of the WorldWide Language Institute, answered my questions
in his e-mail of September 15, 1998.
ML: "How do you see multilingualism on the Web?"
BL: "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:
a) 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.
But tradition has been turned upside down. Technology has been popularized. GUIs
(graphical user interfaces) like Windows and Macintosh have hastened the process
(and indeed it's no secret that it was Microsoft's marketing strategy to use
their operating system to make computers easy to use for the average person).
These days this ease of use has spread beyond the PC to the virtual, networked
space of the Internet, so that now nonprogrammers can even insert Java applets
into their webpages without understanding a single line of code.
b) Competition for a chunk of the 'global market' by major industry players
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.
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.
c) Technological developments
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.
There is a change-over period, of course. Much of the technical terminology on
the Web is still not translated into other languages. And as we found with our
Multilingual Glossary of Internet Terminology -- known as NetGlos -- the
translation of these terms is not always a simple process. Before a new term
becomes accepted as the 'correct' one, there is a period of instability where a
number of competing candidates are used. Often an English loanword becomes the
starting point -- and in many cases the endpoint. But eventually a winner
emerges that becomes codified into published technical dictionaries as well as
the everyday interactions of the nontechnical user. The latest version of
NetGlos is the Russian one and it should be available in a couple of weeks or so
[end of September 1998]. It will no doubt be an excellent example of the
ongoing, dynamic process of 'Russification' of Web terminology.
d) Linguistic democracy
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.
e) Electronic commerce
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. If they want to be successful, they
had better make sure they are speaking the languages of their customers!"
ML: "What did the Internet bring to the life of your organization?"
BK: "Our main service is providing language instruction via the Web. Our company
is in the unique position of having come into existence BECAUSE of the
Internet!"
ML: "How do you see the future of Internet-related activities as regards
languages?"
BK: "As a company that derives its very existence from the importance attached
to languages, I believe the future will be an exciting and challenging one. But
it will be impossible to be complacent about our successes and accomplishments.
Technology is already changing at a frenetic pace. Life-long learning is a
strategy that we all must use if we are to stay ahead and be competitive. 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. I think the hundreds of visitors we get
coming to the NetGlos pages everyday is an excellent testimony to the success of
these types of working relationships. I see the future depending even more on
cooperative relationships -- although not necessarily on a volunteer basis."
3.4. Textual Databases
Let us take the example of two textual databases relating to the French language
-- the French FRANTEXT and the US-French ARTFL Project.
The FRANTEXT textual database has been available on the Web through subscription
since the beginning of 1995. It is prepared in France by the Institut national
de la langue française (INaLF) (National Institute of the French Language), a
section of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) (National
Center for Scientific Research). This interactive database includes 180 million
words resulting from the automatic processing of a collection of 3,500 texts in
arts, techniques and sciences, representing five centuries of literature
(16th-20th centuries).
At the beginning of 1998, 82 research centers and university libraries in
Europe, Australia, Canada and Japan were subscribing to FRANTEXT, with 1,250
work stations connected to the database, and about 50 questioning sessions per
day. The detailed results of the inquiry sent to FRANTEXT users in January 1998
are presented on the website by Arlette Attali.
In the future, Arlette Attali is thinking about "contributing to the development
of the linguistic tools associated to the FRANTEXT database and getting
teachers, researchers and students to know them." In her e-mail of June 11,
1998, she also explained the changes brought by the Internet in her professional
life:
"As I was more specially assigned to the development of textual databases at the
INaLF, I had to explore the websites giving access to electronic texts and test
them. I became a 'textual tourist' with the good and bad sides of this activity.
The tendency to go quickly from one link to another, and to skip through the
information, was a permanent danger -- it is necessary to target what you are
looking for if you don't want to lose your time. The use of the Web totally
changed my working methods -- my investigations are not only bookish and within
a narrow circle anymore, on the contrary they are expanding thanks to the
electronic texts available on the Internet."
The ARTFL Project (ARTFL: American and French Research on the Treasury of the
French Language) is a cooperative project established in 1981 by the Institut
national de la langue française (INaLF) (National Institute of the French
Language, based in France) and the Division of the Humanities of the University
of Chicago. Its purpose is to be a research tool for scholars and students in
all areas of French studies.
The origin of the project is a 1957 initiative of the French government to
create a new dictionary of the French language, the Trésor de la Langue
Française (Treasure of the French Language). In order to provide access to a
large body of word samples, it was decided to transcribe an extensive selection
of French texts for use with a computer. Twenty years later, a corpus totaling
some 150 million words had been created, representing a broad range of written
French -- from novels and poetry to biology and mathematics -- stretching from
the 17th to the 20th centuries.
This corpus of French texts was an important resource not only for
lexicographers, but also for many other types of humanists and social scientists
engaged in French studies -- on both sides of the Atlantic. The result of this
realization was the ARTFL Project, as explained on its website:
"At present the corpus consists of nearly 2,000 texts, ranging from classic
works of French literature to various kinds of non-fiction prose and technical
writing. The eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries are about equally
represented, with a smaller selection of seventeenth century texts as well as
some medieval and Renaissance texts. We have also recently added a Provençal
database that includes 38 texts in their original spellings. Genres include
novels, verse, theater, journalism, essays, correspondence, and treatises.
Subjects include literary criticism, biology, history, economics, and
philosophy. In most cases standard scholarly editions were used in converting
the text into machine-readable form, and the data contain page references to
these editions."
One of the largest of its kind in the world, the ARTFL database permits both the
rapid exploration of single texts, and the inter-textual research of a kind.
ARTFL is now on the Web, and the system is available through the Internet to its
subscribers. Access to the database is organized through a consortium of user
institutions, in most cases universities and colleges which pay an annual
subscription fee.
The ARTFL Encyclopédie Project is currently developing an on-line version of
Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences,
des arts et des métiers, including all 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of
plates from the first edition, that is to say about 18,000 pages of text and
exactly 20,736,912 words.
Published under the direction of Diderot between 1751 and 1772, the Encyclopédie
counted as contributors the most prominent philosophers of the time: Voltaire,
Rousseau, d'Alembert, Marmontel, d'Holbach, Turgot, etc.