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Peter Raggett, deputy-head (and then head) of the Central Library at
the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), wrote
in August 1999: "I think it is incumbent on European organizations and
businesses to try and offer websites in three or four languages if
resources permit. 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."
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In 1999, the subtitle of Babel's website was: "Towards communicating on
the internet in any language..." Babel was a joint project from Alis
Technologies and the Internet Society to contribute to the
internationalization of the internet. Babel offered a multilingual
website (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and
Swedish), with information about the world's languages, and a
typographical and linguistic glossary. "The Internet and
Multilingualism" section gave information on how to develop a
multilingual website, and how to code the "world's writing".
Bill Dunlap, founder of Euro-Marketing Associates, a company based in
San Francisco and Paris, launched the international marketing
consultancy Global Reach as a methodology for U.S. companies to expand
their internet presence into an international framework. This included
translating a website into other languages, actively promoting it, and
using local online banner advertising to increase local website
traffic.
Bill Dunlap explained in December 1998: "Promoting your website is at
least as important as creating it, if not more important. 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. (...)
Since 1981, when my professional life started, I've been involved with
bringing American companies in Europe. This is very much an issue of
language, since the products and their marketing have to be in the
languages of Europe in order for them to be visible here. Since the web
became popular in 1995 or so, I've turned these activities to their
online dimension, and have come to champion European e-commerce among
my fellow American compatriots. Most lately at Internet World in New
York, I spoke about European e-commerce and how to use a website to
address the various markets in Europe."
Bill added in July 1999: "After a website's home page is available in
several languages, the next step is the development of content in each
language. A webmaster will notice which languages draw more visitors
(and sales) than others, and these are the places to start in a
multilingual web promotion campaign. At the same time, it is always
good to increase the number of languages available on a website: just a
home page translated into other languages would do for a start, before
it becomes obvious that more should be done to develop a certain
language branch on a website."
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in October 1994 to
develop interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines,
software, and tools) for the web, for example specifications for markup
languages (HTML, XML, and others), and to act as a forum for
information, commerce, communication and collective understanding. In
1998, the section Internationalization/Localization gave a definition
of protocols used for internationalization/localization: HTML, base
character set, new tags and attributes, HTTP, language negotiation,
URLs & other identifiers including non-ASCII characters, etc. It also
offered some help with creating a multilingual website.
The Localisation Industry Standards Association (LISA) was created in
the mid-1990s as a forum for "software publishers, hardware
manufacturers, localization service vendors, and an increasing number
of companies from related IT sectors." LISA has defined its mission as
"promoting the localization and internationalization industry and
providing a mechanism and services to enable companies to exchange and
share information on the development of processes, tools, technologies
and business models connected with localization, internationalization
and related topics". Its website was first housed and maintained by the
University of Geneva, Switzerland.
Launched in January 1999 by the European Commission, the website
HLTCentral (HLT: Human Language Technologies) gave a short definition
of language engineering: "Through language engineering we can find ways
of living comfortably with technology. Our knowledge of language can be
used to develop systems that recognize 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."