Chapter 4
Since 1981, when my professional life started, I've been involved with bringing American companies to 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 compatriates. 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.
= What is the purpose of the Global Reach program?
Promoting your Web site 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 Web site 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 Web site to many countries, speak to online visitors in their own language and reach online markets there.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
There are so few people in the U.S. interested in communicating in many languages -- most Americans are still under the delusion that the rest of the world speaks English. However, here in Europe (I'm writing from France), the countries are small enough so that an international perspective has been necessary for centuries.
*Interview of July 23, 1999
= What practical suggestions do you have for the development of a multilingual website?
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.
= What is your best experience with the Internet?
Working in tandem with hundreds of people, without any pressure. It's a great life.
= And your worst experience?
Several times, I've published an online forum, in which several insulting individuals started sending nasty mail to the forum. It went out to hundreds of people, and then they started sending nasty mail back. It had a snowball effect, and I remember waking up one morning with over 4,000 messages to download. What a mess!
JACQUES GAUCHEY (San Franscico)
#Specialist in the information technology industry, "facilitator" between the United States and Europe, and journalist
Created in 1993, Jacques Gauchey's consultancy G.a Communications assists start-up Internet and IT (information technology) companies in building their European strategies, partnerships, and visibility. To fulfill its clients' international business development needs, G.a Communications maintains a close-knit network of competences worldwide.
Jacques Gauchey was a director of the Multimedia Development Group (MDG) in 1996-97. He led MDG's International Group from 1994 to 1996, with projects ranging from MDG's M3 conference (1994) to publishing the 1995 and 1996 editions of the guide Going Global: Multimedia Marketing & Distribution.
He was a moderator at such events as the European ETRE & Asian ATRE only-for-CEOs IT conferences (1990, '91 & '92), MDG's "World Multimedia: A Mosaic of Markets" (San Francisco, 1994), Multimedia Live! (San Francisco, 1995), the A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) Soft International Partners seminar (Tokyo, 1996), etc. He moderates focus groups for the IT industry.
From 1985 to 1992, he was the West Coast correspondent for La Tribune, a Paris business daily. He worked previously for Le Figaro and Le Point.
*Interview of July 31, 1999 (original interview in French)
= How did using the Internet change your professional life?
Totally. The whole world is on my computer screen. Everyone now has access to a global database. They have to learn to navigate their way through it or get drowned.
= How do you see the future?
All my clients now are Internet companies. All my working tools (my mobile phone, my PDA and my PC) are or will soon be linked to the Internet.
= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?
Copyright in its traditional context doesn't exist any more. Authors have to get used to a new situation: the total freedom of the flow of information. The original content is like a fingerprint: it can't be copied. So it will survive and flourish.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
Technology may solve the problem. May the best one win. The Internet really took off in the US because of a revolutionary concept: only one language -- English. The "politically correct" movement for mandatory multilingual teaching in US schools and respect for the various subcultures is a disaster for the future of this country (as it already is in Europe). Individuals have to decide at home if they want to learn another language.
= What is your best experience with the Internet?
Four years ago I published a few issues of a free English newsletter on the Internet. It had about 10 readers per issue until the day (in January 1996) when the electronic version of Wired Magazine created a link to it. In one week I got about 100 e-mails, some from French readers of my book La vallée du risque - Silicon Valley (published by Plon, Paris, at the end of 1990), who were happy to find me again.
= And your worst experience?
The Internet is a medium and, like any medium, can be lead to evil. The shooting spree by a day trader in Atlanta in July 1999. Pornography. The unrestricted online sale of guns. Junk mail.
MARCEL GRANGIER (Bern)
#Head of the French Section of the Swiss Federal Government's Central Linguistic Services
*Interview of January 14, 1999 (original interview in French)
= How did using the Internet change your professional life?
To work without the Internet is simply impossible now. Apart from all the tools used (e-mail, the electronic press, services for translators), the Internet is for us a vital and endless source of information in what I'd call the "non-structured sector" of the Web. For example, when the answer to a translation problem can't be found on websites presenting information in an organized way, in most cases search engines allow us to find the missing link somewhere on the network.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
We can see multilingualism on the Internet as a happy and irreversible inevitability. So we have to laugh at the doomsayers who only complain about the supremacy of English. Such supremacy isn't wrong in itself, because it's mainly based on statistics (more PCs per inhabitant, more people speaking English, etc.). The answer isn't to "fight English," much less whine about it, but to build more sites in other languages. As a translation service, we also recommend that websites be multilingual.
= How do you see the future?
The increasing number of languages on the Internet is inevitable and can only boost multicultural exchanges. For this to happen in the best possible circumstances, we still need to develop tools to improve compatibility. Fully coping with accents and other characters is only one example of what can be done.
*Interview of January 25, 2000 (original interview in French)
= Can you tell us about your website?
Our website was first conceived as an Intranet service for translators in Switzerland, who often deal with the same kind of material as the federal government's translators. Some parts of it are useful to any translators, wherever they are. The electronic dictionaries (Dictionnaires électroniques) are only one section of the website. Other sections deal with administration, law, the French language and general information. The site also hosts the pages of the Conference of Translation Services of European States (COTSOES).
= What exactly is your professional activity?
I'm head of the French Section of the Swiss Federal Government's Central Linguistic Services, which means I'm in charge of organising translation matters for all the linguistic services of the Swiss government.
= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?
There's a problem here and the solution isn't obvious. It's a pity the battle against this kind of fraud will eventually justify, along with other abuses, a "Web police," which sadly is very far from the spirit in which the Web was created.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
We now have a multilingual Internet. We have to build it up and ensure it's easy to access, which'll probably take a bit longer.
BARBARA GRIMES (Hawaii)
#Editor of Ethnologue: Languages of the World
The Ethnologue is a catalogue of more than 6,700 languages. A paper version and a CD-ROM are also available.
*Interview of August 18, 1998
= How did using the Internet change your professional life?
We have found the Internet to be useful, convenient, and supplementary to our work. Our main use of it is for e-mail. It is a convenient means of making information more widely available to a wider audience than the printed Ethnologue provides.
On the other hand, many people in the audience we wish to reach do not have access to computers, so in some ways the Ethnologue on the Internet reaches a limited audience who own computers. I am particularly thinking of people in the so-called "third world".
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
Multilingual web pages are more widely useful, but much more costly to maintain. We have had requests for the Ethnologue in a few other languages, but we do not have the personnel or funds to do the translation or maintenance, since it is constantly being updated.
*Interview of January 15, 2000
= Can you tell us about the Ethnologue?
It is a catalog of the languages of the world, with information about where they are spoken, an estimate of the number of speakers, what language family they are in, alternate names, names of dialects, other sociolinguistic and demographic information, dates of published Bibles, a name index, a language family index, and language maps.
= What exactly is your professional activity?
I am the editor of the 8th to 14th editions, 1971-2000.
= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?
Any copyrights should be respected, just as with print matter.
= What is your best experience with the Internet?
Receiving corrections and new reliable information.
= And your worst experience?
Unkind criticism or that which does not include corrections.
MICHAEL HART (Illinois)
#Founder of Project Gutenberg, the oldest digital library on the Internet
Project Gutenberg, set up by Michael Hart in 1971 when he was a student at the University of Illinois (USA), was the Internet's first information provider. From the beginning, its mission has been to put at everybody's disposal, free, as many books as possible whose copyright has expired. It is now the biggest digital library on the Web in terms of the number of books (3,700 e-texts in July 2001) that have been patiently digitized in text format by 600 volunteers from all over the world. Some old documents are typed line by line, mainly because the originals are unclear, but most works are scanned using OCR (optical character recognition) software. Then they are read and corrected twice, sometimes by two different people. At first they were just books in English, but now ones in other languages are being digitized.
*Interview of August 23, 1998
= How do you see the relationship between the print media and the Internet?
We consider e-text to be a new medium, with no real relationship to paper, other than presenting the same material, but I don't see how paper can possibly compete once people each find their own comfortable way to e-texts, especially in schools.
= How did using the Internet change your professional life?
My career couldn't have happened without the Internet, and neither could Project Gutenberg have happened. I presume you know that Project Gutenberg was the first information provider on the Net.
= What are your new projects?
My own personal goal is to put 10,000 Etexts on the Net, and if I can get some major support, I would like to expand that to 1,000,000 and to also expand our potential audience for the average Etext from 1.x% of the world population to over 10%, thus changing our goal from giving away 1,000,000,000,000 Etexts to 1,000 time as many, a trillion and a quadrillion in US terminology.
*Interview of July 23, 1999
= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?
The kind of copyright debate going on is totally impractical. It is run by and for the "Landed Gentry of the Information Age." Information Age? For whom? No one has said more against copyright extensions that I have, but Hollywood and the big publishers have seen to it that our Congress won't even mention it in public.
= What are exactly these copyright extensions?
Nothing will expire for another 20 years. We used to have to wait 75 years. Now it is 95 years. And it was 28 years (+ a possible 28 year extension, only on request before that) and 14 years (+ a possible 14 year extension before that). So, as you can see, this is a serious degrading of the public domain, as a matter of continuing policy.
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
We will eventually have a really good Babelfish (AltaVista's translation software). I am publishing in one new language per month right now, and will continue as long as possible.
= What is your best experience with the Internet?
The notes I get that tell me people appreciate that I have spent my life putting books, etc., on the Internet. Some are quite touching, and can make my whole day.
= And your worst experience?
Getting called on the Chancellor's carpet because Oxford University call him and really shook him up... but I had a team of 6 lawyers, half from the University of Illinois, who backed me up, so we made Oxford back down. You might say that was a good memory, but I hate that kind of politicking... the Chancellor was Tom Cruise's uncle, so that was fun.
ROBERTO HERNANDEZ MONTOYA (Caracas)
#Head of the digital library of the electronic magazine Venezuela Analítica
Roberto Hernández Montoya has a literature degree from the Central University of Venezuela. He is a columnist at El Nacional, Letras, Imagen and Internet World Venezuela. He is a member of the editorial board of Venezuela Cultural, Venezuela Analítica and Imagen. He studied discourse analysis at the School of High Studies in Social Sciences (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales - EHESS), Paris. He was the founding president of the Venezuelan Association of Editors, and the editor of the Ateneo de Caracas.
Venezuela Analítica, an electronic magazine conceived as a public forum to exchange ideas on politics, economics, culture, science and technology, created in May 1997 BitBlioteca, a digital library which contains material mostly in Spanish, and also in French, English and Portuguese.
*Interview of September 3, 1998 (original interview in French)
= How do you see the relationship between the print media and the Internet?
The printed word can't be replaced, at least not in the foreseeable future. The paper book is a wonderful thing. We can't leaf through an electronic text in the same way. But we can find words and groups of words much more quickly. We can read an electronic text more carefully, even with the inconvenience of reading it on the screen. It is less expensive and can be more easily distributed worldwide (not counting the cost of the computer and Internet connection).
= How did using the Internet change your professional life?
The Internet has been personally very important for me. It's become the centre of my life. It's meant that our organization can now communicate with thousands of people -- something we couldn't have afforded if we'd published a paper magazine. I think the Internet is going to be the chief means of communication and exchanging information in the future.
RANDY HOBLER (Dobbs Ferry, New York)
#Internet Marketing Consultant, among others at Globalink, a company specialized in language translation software and services
Randy Hobler has been a consultant in Internet& marketing at IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Burroughs Wellcome, Pepsi, Heublein, etc. In 1998, he was an Internet Marketing Consultant for Globalink, a company specialized in language translation software and services. He wrote: "The joy for me is the ability to combine my vocational skills in high-tech and marketing with avocational interests like language into one. To love what you do and do what you love." Globalink was bought by Lernout & Hauspie in 1999.
*Interview of September 3, 1998
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
85% of the content of the Web in 1998 is in English and going down. This trend is driven not only by more websites and users in non-English-speaking countries, but by increasing localization of company and organization sites, and increasing use of machine translation to/from various languages to translate websites.
Because the Internet has no national boundaries, the organization of users is bounded by other criteria driven by the medium itself. In terms of multilingualism, you have virtual communities, for example, of what I call "Language Nations"... all those people on the Internet wherever they may be, for whom a given language is their native language. Thus, the Spanish Language nation includes not only Spanish and Latin American users, but millions of Hispanic users in the US, as well as odd places like Spanish-speaking Morocco.
= Can you tell us about the future of machine translation?
We are rapidly reaching the point where highly accurate machine translation of text and speech will be so common as to be embedded in computer platforms, and even in chips in various ways. At that point, and as the growth of the Web slows, the accuracy of language translation hits 98% plus, and the saturation of language pairs has covered the vast majority of the market, language transparency (any-language-to-any-language communication) will be too limiting a vision for those selling this technology. The next development will be "transcultural, transnational transparency", in which other aspects of human communication, commerce and transactions beyond language alone will come into play. For example, gesture has meaning, facial movement has meaning and this varies among societies. The thumb-index finger circle means 'OK' in the United States. In Argentina, it is an obscene gesture.
When the inevitable growth of multi-media, multi-lingual videoconferencing comes about, it will be necessary to 'visually edit' gestures on the fly. The MIT (Massachussets Institute of Technology) Media Lab, Microsoft and many others are working on computer recognition of facial expressions, biometric access identification via the face, etc. It won't be any good for a US business person to be making a great point in a Web-based multi-lingual video conference to an Argentinian, having his words translated into perfect Argentinian Spanish if he makes the "O" gesture at the same time. Computers can intercept this kind of thing and edit them on the fly.
There are thousands of ways in which cultures and countries differ, and most of these are computerizable to change as one goes from one culture to the other. They include laws, customs, business practices, ethics, currency conversions, clothing size differences, metric versus English system differences, etc. Enterprising companies will be capturing and programming these differences and selling products and services to help the peoples of the world communicate better. Once this kind of thing is widespread, it will truly contribute to international understanding.
*Interview of September 10, 2000
= What do you think about e-books?
E-books continue to grow as the display technology improves, and as the hardware becomes more physically flexible and lighter. Plus, among the early adapters will be colleges because of the many advantages for students (ability to download all their reading for the entire semester, inexpensiveness, linking into exams, assignments, need for portability, eliminating need to lug books all over).
EDUARD HOVY (Marina del Rey, California)
#Head of the Natural Language Group at USC/ISI (University of Southern California / Information Sciences Institute)
The Natural Language Group (NLG) at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California (USC/ISI) is currently involved in various aspects of computational/natural language processing. The group's projects are: machine translation; automated text summarization; multilingual verb access and text management; development of large concept taxonomies (ontologies); discourse and text generation; construction of large lexicons for various languages; and multimedia communication.
Eduard Hovy, his director, is a member of the Computer Science Departments of USC and of the University of Waterloo. He completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) at Yale University in 1987. His research focuses on machine translation, automated text summarization, text planning and generation, and the semi-automated construction of large lexicons and terminology banks. The Natural Language Group at ISI currently has projects in most of these areas.
Dr. Hovy is the author or editor of four books and over 100 technical articles. He currently serves as the President of the Association of Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA). He is Vice President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), and has served on the editorial boards of Computational Linguistics and the Journal of the Society of Natural Language Processing of Japan.
*Interview of August 27, 1998
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
In the context of information retrieval (IR) and automated text summarization (SUM), multilingualism on the Web is another complexifying factor. People will write their own language for several reasons -- convenience, secrecy, and local applicability -- but that does not mean that other people are not interested in reading what they have to say! This is especially true for companies involved in technology watch (say, a computer company that wants to know, daily, all the Japanese newspaper and other articles that pertain to what they make) or some government intelligence agencies (the people who provide the most up-to-date information for use by your government officials in making policy, etc.). One of the main problems faced by these kinds of people is the flood of information, so they tend to hire "weak" bilinguals who can rapidly scan incoming text and throw out what is not relevant, giving the relevant stuff to professional translators. Obviously, a combination of SUM and MT (machine translation) will help here; since MT is slow, it helps if you can do SUM in the foreign language, and then just do a quick and dirty MT on the result, allowing either a human or an automated IR-based text classifier to decide whether to keep or reject the article.