#Head of Research and Internet Projects at the INaLF (Institut national de la
langue française - National Institute of the French Language)
The purpose of the INaLF -- part of the France's National Centre for Scientific
Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) -- is to design
research programmes on the French language, particularly its vocabulary. The
INaLF's constantly expanding and revised data, processed by special computer
systems, deal with all aspects of the French language: literary discourse
(14th-20th centuries), everyday language (written and spoken), scientific and
technical language (terminologies), and regional languages. This data, which is
an very important study resource, is made available to people interested in the
French language (teachers and researchers, business people, the service sector
and the general public) through publications and databases.
Frantext is one of the best French textual databases on the Internet. It is a
collection of about 3,000 digitized French texts from the 16th to the 20th
centuries, with a search facility (Stella) for literary, linguistic,
lexicographical, and stylistic research. The database, which was revamped in
1998, now has a more user-friendly interface, more efficient online help and
better computing tools. A second version is an experimental section of 400
grammaticaly-encoded novels of 19th and 20th centuries.
*Interview of June 11, 1998 (original interview in French)
= How did using the Internet change your professional life?
At the INaLF, I was mostly building textual databases, so I had to explore
websites that gave access to electronic texts and test them. I became a "textual
tourist", which has good and bad sides. The tendency to go quickly from one link
to another and skip through the information was a permanent danger -- you have
to focus on what you're looking for so as not to waste time. Using the Web has
totally changed the way I work. My research is no longer just book-based and
thus limited, but is expanding thanks to the electronic texts available on the
Internet.
= What are your new projects?
I'd like to help develop linguistic tools linked with Frantext and make them
available to teachers, researchers and students.
*Interview of January 17, 2000 (original interview in French)
= What exactly is your professional activity?
My professional activity consists in research and Internet projects, and in
development of textual resources.
= What are your new projects?
- The Catalogue critique des ressources textuelles sur Internet (CCRTI)
(Critical Catalogue of Textual Resources on the Internet), online since October
1999.
- Terminalf - Ressources terminologiques en langue française (Terminological
resources in French), in progress.
= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?
Like all debates, it is a confused debate, with no way out.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
Europeans are making some efforts towards at least bilingualism. What are the
Americans doing?
= What is your best experience with the Internet?
Finding good literary sites, such as Zvi Har'El's Jules Verne Collection,
dedicated to Jules Verne (a French 19th-century novelist) or le Théâtre de la
foire à Paris, dedicated to the 17th-century Fair Theatre in Paris.