#Founder and president of Travlang, a site dedicated both to travel and
languages
Michael Martin created a Foreign Languages for Travelers section on his
university website in 1994 when he was a physics student in New York. A year
later, after its dizzying growth, he launched Travlang, a site that quickly
became a major portal for travel and languages and won a best travel site award
in 1997. Martin, now an experimental physics researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory in California, sold it to GourmetMarket.com in February
1999, who sold it to iiGroup in January 2000. By July 2000, the site was pulling
in two million visitors a month.
Travlang has two main sections. Foreign Languages for Travelers allows you to
learn 70 different languages on the Web. Translating Dictionaries links to free
dictionaries in Afrikaans, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French,
Frisian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Latin, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and
Swedish. You can also book your hotel, car or plane ticket, look up exchange
rates and browse 7,000 other language and travel sites.
*Interview of August 25, 1998
= How did using the Internet change your professional life?
Well, certainly we've made a little business of our website! The Internet is
really a great tool for communicating with people you wouldn't have the
opportunity to interact with otherwise. I truly enjoy the global collaboration
that has made our Foreign Languages for Travelers pages possible.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
I think the Web is an ideal place to bring different cultures and people
together, and that includes being multilingual. Our Travlang site is so popular
because of this, and people desire to feel in touch with other parts of the
world.
I think computerized full-text translations will become more common, enabling a
lot of basic communications with even more people. This will also help bring the
Internet more completely to the non-English speaking world.