Chapter 6

We exist, we have an address. We know it's hard to speak to each other in anonymity or in a group, so we keep a few landmarks -- the time factor, the human factor, and for the cutters, the cutter mailman, who happens to be Jean-Paul. A first name that is not really one's own name because the thing about a name is that it isn't ours, it's a name passed down by a dynasty, from a string of legally-registered names of our male ancestors.

But we're not rejecting our ancestors. They created our world, what we call reality. But we build up the Web to create another dream. And we launch our cutters in all directions, to make contacts.

= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?

We don't feel involved.

a) If it means "respect", it's a matter of morality and style, so there's nothing to discuss. On the Web, as elsewhere, we quote our sources. Complete respect. For most of us.

b) If it means "copyright", we're on legal ground, which is by nature shaky. Copyright is a recent notion the French attribute to Beaumarchais, a business man with a dark side, an arms dealer and great writer. The advent of digitization, and therefore cloning (which raises a different problem to the one of copying, which was solved long ago), forces us to reconsider this notion.

c) If it means "author's rights" (in the plural), we're in the economic field, where we know what the attitude is: competition, withholding information, being top of the class and stopping others from getting there.

Sony publishes CD (audio and ROM) because it earns them good money. And it makes CD-engravers (which enable you to clone its own CDs, as well as those of its rivals) because it earns them more good money. Philips was doing the same thing until it sold its Polygram division (which, according to the rules of economics, it could buy back if it wanted).

"It's not enough to be big to be successful but, in a totally globalized financial world, it helps." (Hervé Babonneau, Ouest-France (French daily newspaper), August 6, 1999). "A funny aim", says the sturdy cutter. Jurassic Games and tyrannosaurus more or less rex.

Although it's marginally economic (we have to pay for a domain name and a subscription to the server), our cutter-space isn't limited to that and we don't have a competitive attitude. Our site can be freely downloaded, and we download sites we think are creative.

It's normal to clone someone else's work and give it away as a gift. It's a way to share. What's disgusting is to sell a clone.

The job of legal experts is to prove the authorities right: yesterday it was the guillotine for backstreet abortionists, today the social security reimburses the cost of abortions (in France, though not in Poland).

Copyright or author's rights, a European vision or a US one, which will prevail? The sacred principle of private property. The property of those who have the means to keep it. Through the World Trade Organization (WTO), for example, which is in charge of settling "rights" issues anywhere in the world (even the virtual world) and, they hope, permanently.

If your house is the path of a future highway, you know the real price of something untouchable.

So the rights of authors, creators, inventors...

Orson Welles was gobbled up by the big studios, but Kubrick carefully stayed independent of them. The law made to measure by Uncle Picsou matters little. Over time, small mammals have eaten tyrannosaurs. And we've cut off the heads of kings, who supposedly drew their power from the gods. And we did that more quickly.

"To give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe", Stéphane Mallarmé wrote. And when the credit cards have won (apparently in three years time), we must invent other ways to take us to another Cape of Good Hope, where we can watch "new stars rise from the distant horizon", like J.M. de Heredia.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

Your book (which is really good and useful -- I get something out of it every time I read it, and it has good addresses too) deals with this whole subject: "Sooner or later the presence of languages on the Web will reflect their strength around the world." Depending on the energy of those who speak them.

= What is your best experience with the Internet?

How light-headed we felt when we received our first message... coming from Canada. 10.000 (?) years after the Inuits, our cutters had just discovered America!

= And your worst experience?

All the sleep I'm missing...

*Interview of June 25, 2000 (original interview in French)

= How did using the hyperlink change your writing?

Surfing the Web is like radiating in all directions (I'm interested in something and I click on all the links on a home page) or like jumping around (from one click to another, as the links appear). You can do this in the written media, of course. But the difference is striking. So the Internet didn't change my life, but it did change how I write. You don't write the same way for a website as you do for a script or a play.

But it wasn't exactly the Internet that changed my writing, it was the first model of the Mac. I discovered it when I was teaching myself Hypercard. I still remember how astonished I was during my month of learning about buttons and links and about surfing by association, objects and images. Being able, by just clicking on part of the screen, to open piles of cards, with each card offering new buttons and each button opening onto a new series of them. In short, learning everything about the Web that today seems really routine was a revelation for me. I hear Steve Jobs and his team had the same kind of shock when they discovered the forerunner of the Mac in the laboratories of Rank Xerox.

Since then I've been writing directly on the screen. I use a paper print-out only occasionally, to help me fix up an article, or to give somebody who doesn't like screens a rough idea, something immediate. It's only an approximation, because print forces us into a linear relationship: the words scroll out page by page most of the time. But when you have links, you've got a different relationship to time and space in your imagination. And for me, it's a great opportunity to use this reading/writing interplay, whereas leafing through a book gives only a suggestion of it -- a vague one because a book isn't meant for that.

BRIAN KING

#Director of the WorldWide Language Institute, who initiated NetGlos (The Multilingual Glossary of Internet Terminology)

One of the WorldWide Language Institute's projects is NetGlos (The Multilingual Glossary of Internet Terminology), which is currently being compiled from 1995 as a voluntary, collaborative project by a number of translators and other professionals. Versions for the following languages are being prepared: Chinese, Croatian, English, Dutch/Flemish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Maori, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

*Interview of September 15, 1998

= How did using the Internet change the life of your organization?

Our main service is providing language instruction via the Web. Our company is in the unique position of having come into existence because of the Internet!

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

Although English is still the most important language used on the Web, and the Internet in general, I believe that multilingualism is an inevitable part of the future direction of cyberspace.

Here are some of the important developments that I see as making a multilingual Web become a reality:

1. Popularization of information technology

Computer technology has traditionally been the sole domain of a "techie" elite, fluent in both complex programming languages and in English -- the universal language of science and technology. Computers were never designed to handle writing systems that couldn't be translated into ASCII (American standard code for information interchange). There wasn't much room for anything other than the 26 letters of the English alphabet in a coding system that originally couldn't even recognize acute accents and umlauts -- not to mention nonalphabetic systems like Chinese.

But tradition has been turned upside down. Technology has been popularized. GUIs (graphical user interfaces) like Windows and Macintosh have hastened the process (and indeed it's no secret that it was Microsoft's marketing strategy to use their operating system to make computers easy to use for the average person). These days this ease of use has spread beyond the PC to the virtual, networked space of the Internet, so that now nonprogrammers can even insert Java applets into their webpages without understanding a single line of code.

2. Competition for a chunk of the "global market" by major industry players

An extension of (local) popularization is the export of information technology around the world. Popularization has now occurred on a global scale and English is no longer necessarily the lingua franca of the user. Perhaps there is no true lingua franca, but only the individual languages of the users. One thing is certain -- it is no longer necessary to understand English to use a computer, nor it is necessary to have a degree in computer science.

A pull from non-English-speaking computer users and a push from technology companies competing for global markets has made localization a fast growing area in software and hardware development. This development has not been as fast as it could have been. The first step was for ASCII to become Extended ASCII. This meant that computers could begin to start recognizing the accents and symbols used in variants of the English alphabet -- mostly used by European languages. But only one language could be displayed on a page at a time.

3. Technological developments

The most recent development is Unicode. Although still evolving and only just being incorporated into the latest software, this new coding system translates each character into 16 bytes. Whereas 8 byte Extended ASCII could only handle a maximum of 256 characters, Unicode can handle over 65,000 unique characters and therefore potentially accommodate all of the world's writing systems on the computer.

So now the tools are more or less in place. They are still not perfect, but at last we can at least surf the Web in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and numerous other languages that don't use the Western alphabet. As the Internet spreads to parts of the world where English is rarely used -- such as China, for example, it is natural that Chinese, and not English, will be the preferred choice for interacting with it. For the majority of the users in China, their mother tongue will be the only choice.

There is a change-over period, of course. Much of the technical terminology on the Web is still not translated into other languages. And as we found with our Multilingual Glossary of Internet Terminology -- known as NetGlos -- the translation of these terms is not always a simple process. Before a new term becomes accepted as the "correct" one, there is a period of instability where a number of competing candidates are used. Often an English loanword becomes the starting point -- and in many cases the endpoint. But eventually a winner emerges that becomes codified into published technical dictionaries as well as the everyday interactions of the nontechnical user. The latest version of NetGlos is the Russian one and it should be available in a couple of weeks or so (end of September 1998). It will no doubt be an excellent example of the ongoing, dynamic process of "russification" of Web terminology.

4. Linguistic democracy

Whereas "mother-tongue education" was deemed a human right for every child in the world by a Unesco report in the early '50s, "mother-tongue surfing" may very well be the Information Age equivalent. If the Internet is to truly become the global network that it is promoted as being, then all users, regardless of language background, should have access to it. To keep the Internet as the preserve of those who, by historical accident, practical necessity, or political privilege, happen to know English, is unfair to those who don't.

5. Electronic commerce

Although a multilingual Web may be desirable on moral and ethical grounds, such high ideals are not enough to make it other than a reality on a small-scale. As well as the appropriate technology being available so that the non-English speaker can go, there is the impact of "electronic commerce" as a major force that may make multilingualism the most natural path for cyberspace.

Sellers of products and services in the virtual global marketplace into which the Internet is developing must be prepared to deal with a virtual world that is just as multilingual as the physical world. If they want to be successful, they had better make sure they are speaking the languages of their customers!

= How do you see the future?

As a company that derives its very existence from the importance attached to languages, I believe the future will be an exciting and challenging one. But it will be impossible to be complacent about our successes and accomplishments. Technology is already changing at a frenetic pace. Life-long learning is a strategy that we all must use if we are to stay ahead and be competitive. This is a difficult enough task in an English-speaking environment. If we add in the complexities of interacting in a multilingual/multicultural cyberspace, then the task becomes even more demanding. As well as competition, there is also the necessity for cooperation -- perhaps more so than ever before.

The seeds of cooperation across the Internet have certainly already been sown. Our NetGlos Project has depended on the goodwill of volunteer translators from Canada, U.S., Austria, Norway, Belgium, Israel, Portugal, Russia, Greece, Brazil, New Zealand and other countries. I think the hundreds of visitors we get coming to the NetGlos pages everyday is an excellent testimony to the success of these types of working relationships. I see the future depending even more on cooperative relationships -- although not necessarily on a volunteer basis.

GEOFFREY KINGSCOTT (London)

#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.

STEVEN KRAUWER (Utrecht, Netherlands)

#Coordinator of ELSNET (European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies)

ELSNET (European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies) has 135 European academic and industrial institutions as members. The long-term technological goal which unites the participants of ELSNET is to build multilingual speech and NL (natural language) systems with unrestricted coverage of both spoken and written language. It is funded by the European Commission.

Steven Krauwer, coordinator of ELSNET, is a senior lecturer/researcher in Computational Linguistics at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS (Utrecht University, Netherlands). His main interests are: machine translation; evaluation of language and speech systems; integration of language, speech and other modalities.

*Interview of September 23, 1998

= How did using the Internet change your professional life?

It's my chief way of communicating with others and my main source of information. I'm sure I'll spend the rest of my professional life trying to use it to remove or at least lower the language barriers.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

As a European citizen, I think multilingualism on the Web is absolutely essential, because in the long run I don't think it's a healthy situation when only those who have a reasonable command of English can take full advantage of what the Web has to offer.

As a researcher (specialized in machine translation), I see multilingualism as a major challenge: how can we ensure that all information on the Web is accessible to everybody, irrespective of language differences.

*Interview of August 4, 1999

= What has happened since our first interview?

I've become more and more convinced we should be careful not to address the multilinguality problem in isolation. I've just returned from a wonderful summer vacation in France, and even if my knowledge of French is modest (to put it mildly), it's surprising to see that I still manage to communicate successfully by combining my poor French with gestures, facial expressions, visual clues and diagrams. I think the Web (as opposed to old-fashioned text-only email) offers excellent opportunities to exploit the fact that transmission of information via different channels (or modalities) can still work, even if the process is only partially successful for each of the channels in isolation.

= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?

The baseline is of course "thou shalt not steal, even if it's easy". It's interesting to note that, however complex it is to define legally, most people have very good intuition about what counts as stealing:

- if I copy info from the Web and use it for my own purposes, I'm not stealing, because this is exactly why the information was put on the Web in the first place;

- if I copy info from the Web and re-transmit it to others, giving credit to the author, I am not stealing;

- if I copy info from the Web and re-transmit it to others, pretending I'm the author, I am stealing;

- if I copy info from the Web and sell it to others without permission from the author, I am stealing.

I realize there are lots of borderline cases where it's not immediately clear what counts as stealing, but let's leave that to the lawyers to figure out.

= What practical solutions would you suggest?

I would adopt the following rules of thumb:

- copying info for your own use is always free;

- re-transmission is OK with proper credit to the author (unless the info is explicitely labeled as public);

- re-sale of info is OK with permission of the author (unless public).

To back this up one could envisage:

- introducing standard labels (for each mime type) which indicate whether the info is public, and if not, point to the author;

- making browsers "label-aware", so they can show the content of the label when displaying text, pictures and movies;

- adopting the convention/rule that info cannot be copied without the label;

- (a bit more adventurous) setting up an ISPN (international standard person number), similar to ISBN (international standard book number) and ISSN (international standard serial number), which identifies a person, so that references to authors in the labels are less dependent on changes in e-mail addresses and home pages (as long as people keep their addresses in the ISPN database up-to-date, of course).

= What practical solutions would you suggest for the growth of a multilingual Web?

- At the author end: better education of web authors to use combinations of modalities to make communication more effective across language barriers (and not just for cosmetic reasons);

- at the server end: more translation facilities à la AltaVista (quality not impressive, but always better than nothing);

- at the browser end: more integrated translation facilities (especially for the smaller languages), and more quick integrated dictionary lookup facilities.

= What is your best experience with the Internet?

One night I heard on a foreign radio station a fragment of a song and the name of a person, and using only the Internet I was able to:

- identify the person as the composer;

- find the title of the song;

- confirm that this was actually the song I'd heard;

- discover that it was part of a musical;

- find the title of the CD-set of the musical;

- buy the CDs;

- find the website of the musical;

- find the country and place where the musical was still being performed, including when;

- find the phone number and opening hours of the booking office;

- get a map of the city, and directions to get to the theatre.

I could've done my hotel and flight bookings via the Internet too, but it wasn't necessary in this case.

The only thing I could not do was the actual booking, because they didn't accept Internet bookings from abroad at the time, for security reasons.

I had a wonderful time at the theatre, and I don't think this would've been possible without the Internet!

= And your worst experience?

Nothing specific, but there are a few repetitive ones:

- unsolicited commercial e-mails;

- web pages full of ads;

- pages overloaded with irrelevant, time-consuming graphics;

- dead links.

*Interview of June 1st, 2001

= How much do you still work with paper?

I use paper a lot. All important documents are printed out, as they are a lot easier to consult on paper (easier to browse, never a dead battery). I don't think that this is going to change for quite a while.

= What do you think about e-books?

Still a long way to go before reading from a screen feels as comfortable as reading a book.

= What is your definition of cyberspace?

For me the cyberspace is the part of the universe (including people, machines and information) that I can reach from behind my desk.

= How would you define the information society?

An information society is a society:

- where most of the knowledge and information is no longer stored in people's brains or books but on electronic media,

- where the information repositories are distributed, interconnected via an information infrastructure, and accessible from anywhere, and