#Co-editor of the online magazine Language Today
Geoffrey Kingscott is the managing director of Praetorius, a major British
translation company and language consultancy, and one of the two editors of
Language today, an online magazine for people working in applied languages:
translators, interpreters, terminologists, lexicographers and technical writers.
*Interview of September 4, 1998
= What did using the Internet bring to your company?
The Internet has made comparatively little difference to our company. It is an
additional medium rather than one which will replace all others.
We will continue to have a company website, and to publish a version of the
magazine on the Web, but it will remain only one factor in our work. We do use
the Internet as a source of information which we then distill for our readers,
who would otherwise be faced with the biggest problem of the Web --
undiscriminating floods of information.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
Because the salient characteristics of the Web are the multiplicity of site
generators and the cheapness of message generation, as the Web matures it will
in fact promote multilingualism. The fact that the Web originated in the USA
means that it is still predominantly in English but this is only a temporary
phenomenon. If I may explain this further, when we relied on the print and
audiovisual (film, television, radio, video, cassettes) media, we had to depend
on the information or entertainment we wanted to receive being brought to us by
agents (publishers, television and radio stations, cassette and video producers)
who have to subsist in a commercial world or -- as in the case of public service
broadcasting -- under severe budgetary restraints. That means that the size of
the customer-base is all-important, and determines the degree to which languages
other than the ubiquitous English can be accommodated. These constraints
disappear with the Web.
To give only a minor example from our own experience, we publish the print
version of Language Today only in English, the common denominator of our
readers. When we use an article which was originally in a language other than
English, or report an interview which was conducted in a language other than
English, we translate into English and publish only the English version. This is
because the number of pages we can print is constrained, governed by our
customer-base (advertisers and subscribers). But for our Web edition we also
give the original version.