Chapter 3

Thousands of years ago, in Egypt, China and elsewhere, people were more conscious about communicating their laws and thoughts not in just one language, but in different languages. In our modern world, each nation state has adopted more or less one language for its own use. I see in the future of the Internet a greater use of different languages and multilingual pages, not a simple gravitation to American English, and a more creative use of multilingual computer translation. Ninety nine percent of the Webs created in Japan are written in Japanese!"

Maintained on the website of the College Sabhal Mór Ostaig, Island of Skye, Scotland, by Caoimhín P. Ó Donnaíle, European Minority Languages is a list of minority languages by alphabetic order and by language family. The site also gives links to other sites dealing with the same subject worldwide.

Caoimhín P. Ó Donnaíle wrote in her e-mail of August 18, 1998:

"-- The Internet has contributed and will contribute to the wildfire spread of English as a world language.

-- The Internet can greatly help minority languages, but this will not happen by itself. It will only happen if people want to maintain the language as an aim in itself.

-- The Web is very useful for delivering language lessons, and there is a big demand for this.

-- The Unicode (ISO 10646) character set standard is very important and will greatly assist in making the Internet more multilingual."

3.3. Dictionaries and Glossaries

There are more and more on-line dictionaries. Let us give three examples (English, French and multilingual).

In Merriam-Webster Online: the Language Center, a main publisher of English dictionaries gives free access to a collection of on-line resources. The goal is to help track down definitions, spellings, pronunciations, synonyms, vocabulary exercises, and other key facts about words and language. The main on-line resources are: WWWebster Dictionary, WWebster Thesaurus, Webster's Third (a lexical landmark), Guide to International Business Communications, Vocabulary Builder (with interactive vocabulary quizzes), and the Barnhart Dictionary Companion (hot new words).

The Dictionnaire francophone en ligne is the web version of the Dictionnaire universel francophone, published by Hachette, a major French publisher, and the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie (AUPELF-UREF) (University Agency for Francophony), which presents the standard French and the French words and expressions used in the five continents.

The Logos Dictionary is a multilingual dictionary with 8 million entry words in all languages. Logos, an international translation company based in Modena, Italy, gives free access to the linguistic tools used by its translators: 200 translators in its headquarters and 2,500 translators on-line all over the world, who process around 200 texts per day. Apart from the Logos Dictionary, these tools include: the Wordtheque, a word-by-word multilingual library with a massive database (325 million words) containing multilingual novels, technical literature and translated texts; Linguistic Resources, a database of 536 glossaries; and the Universal Conjugator, a database for conjugation of verbs in 17 languages.

In Les mots pour le dire, an article of the French daily newspaper Le Monde of December 7, 1997, Annie Kahn wrote:

"The Logos site is much more than a mere dictionary or a collection of links to other on-line dictionaries. A cornerstone of the system is the document search software, which processes a corpus of literary texts available free of charge on the Web. If you search for the definition or the translation of a word ('didactique', for example), you get not only the answer sought, but also a quote from one of the literary works containing the word (in our case, an essay by Voltaire). All it takes is a click on the mouse to access the whole text or even to order the book, thanks to a partnership agreement with Amazon.com, the well-known on-line book shop. Foreign translations are also available. If however no text containing the required word is found, the system acts as a search engine, sending the user to other websites concerning the term in question. In the case of certain words, you can even hear the pronunciation. If there is no translation currently available, the system calls on the public to contribute. Everyone can make their own suggestion, after which Logos translators and the company verify the translations forwarded."

In the same article, Rodrigo Vergara, the Head of Logos, explained:

"We wanted all our translators to have access to the same translation tools. So we made them available on the Internet, and while we were at it we decided to make the site open to the public. This made us extremely popular, and also gave us a lot of exposure. In fact the operation attracted a great number of customers, and also allowed us to widen our network of translators, thanks to the contacts made in the wake of this initiative."

The dictionary directories are invaluable tools for linguists, such as Dictionnaires électroniques (Electronic Dictionaries), OneLook Dictionaries and A Web of Online Dictionaries.

Dictionnaires électroniques (Electronic Dictionaries) is an extensive list of electronic dictionaries prepared by the Section française des Services linguistiques centraux (SLC-f) (French Section of the Central Linguistic Services) of the Swiss Federal Administration, and classified into five main sections: abbreviations and acronyms; monolingual dictionaries; bilingual dictionaries; multilingual dictionaries; and geographical information. The search of a dictionary is also possible by key-words.

Marcel Grangier, head of this section, answered my questions in his e-mail of January 14, 1999.

ML: "How do you see multilingualism on the Internet?"

MG: "Multilingualism on the Internet can be seen as a happy and above all irreversible inevitability. In this perspective we have to make fun of the wet blankets who only speak to complain about the supremacy of English. This supremacy is not wrong in itself, inasmuch as it is the result of mainly statistical facts (more PCs per inhabitant, more English-speaking people, etc.). The counter-attack is not to 'fight against English' and even less to whine about it, but to increase sites in other languages. As a translation service, we also recommend the multilingualism of websites."

ML: "What did the use of the Internet bring to your professional life?"

MG: "To work without the Internet is simply impossible now -- as well as all the tools used (e-mail, electronic press, services for translators), Internet is for us an essential and inexhaustible source of information in what I would call the 'non-structured sector' of the Web. For example, when the answer to a translation problem can't be found in websites presenting information in an organized way, in most cases search engines allow us to find the missing link somewhere on the network."

ML: "How do you see the future of Internet-related activities as regards languages?"

MG: "The increase in the number of languages on the Internet is inevitable, and can only be a benefit for multicultural exchanges. For the exchanges to happen in an optimal environment, it is still necesssary to develop tools which will improve compatibility -- the complete management of diacritics is only one example of what can be done."

Provided as a free service since April 1996 by Study Technologies, Englewood, Colorado, OneLook Dictionaries, by Robert Ware, is the fastest finder for more than 2 million words in 425 dictionaries in various fields: business, computer/Internet, medical, miscellaneous, religion, science, sports, technology, general, and slang.

In his e-mail of September 2, 1998, Robert Ware explained:

"On the personal side, I was almost entirely in contact with people who spoke one language and did not have much incentive to expand language abilities. Being in contact with the entire world has a way of changing that. And changing it for the better! [...] I have been slow to start including non-English dictionaries (partly because I am monolingual). But you will now find a few included."

A Web of Online Dictionaries, by Robert Beard, is an index of more than 800 on-line dictionaries in 150 languages, and other tools: multilingual dictionaries; specialized English dictionaries; thesauri and other vocabulary aids; language identifiers and guessers; an index of dictionary indices; a Web of on-line grammars; and a Web of linguistic fun (materials about linguistics for non-specialists).

Robert Beard answered my questions in his e-mail of September 1, 1998.

ML: "How do you see multilingualism on the Web?"

RB: "There was an initial fear that the Web posed a threat to multilingualism on the Web, since HTML and other programming languages are based on English and since there are simply more websites in English than any other language. However, my websites indicate that multilingualism is very much alive and the Web may, in fact, serve as a vehicle for preserving many endangered languages. I now have links to dictionaries in 150 languages and grammars of 65 languages. Moreover, the new attention paid by browser developers to the different languages of the world will encourage even more websites in different languages."

ML: "What did the use of the Internet bring to your professional life?"

RB: "As a language teacher, the Web represents a plethora of new resources produced by the target culture, new tools for delivering lessons (interactive Java and Shockwave exercises) and testing, which are available to students any time they have the time or interest -- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is also an almost limitless publication outlet for my colleagues and I, not to mention my institution."

ML: "How do you see the future of Internet-related activities as regards languages?"

RB: "Ultimately all course materials, including lecture notes, exercises, moot and credit testing, grading, and interactive exercises far more effective in conveying concepts that we have not even dreamed of yet. The Web will be an encyclopedia of the world by the world for the world. There will be no information or knowledge that anyone needs that will not be available. The major hindrance to international and interpersonal understanding, personal and institutional enhancement, will be removed. It would take a wilder imagination than mine to predict the effect of this development on the nature of humankind."

Initiated by the WorldWide Language Institute, NetGlos (The Multilingual Glossary of Internet Terminology) 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.

Brian King, director of the WorldWide Language Institute, answered my questions in his e-mail of September 15, 1998.

ML: "How do you see multilingualism on the Web?"

BL: "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:

a) 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. 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.

b) 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.

c) 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.

d) 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.

e) 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!"

ML: "What did the Internet bring to the life of your organization?"

BK: "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!"

ML: "How do you see the future of Internet-related activities as regards languages?"

BK: "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."

3.4. Textual Databases

Let us take the example of two textual databases relating to the French language -- the French FRANTEXT and the US-French ARTFL Project.

The FRANTEXT textual database has been available on the Web through subscription since the beginning of 1995. It is prepared in France by the Institut national de la langue française (INaLF) (National Institute of the French Language), a section of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) (National Center for Scientific Research). This interactive database includes 180 million words resulting from the automatic processing of a collection of 3,500 texts in arts, techniques and sciences, representing five centuries of literature (16th-20th centuries).

At the beginning of 1998, 82 research centers and university libraries in Europe, Australia, Canada and Japan were subscribing to FRANTEXT, with 1,250 work stations connected to the database, and about 50 questioning sessions per day. The detailed results of the inquiry sent to FRANTEXT users in January 1998 are presented on the website by Arlette Attali.

In the future, Arlette Attali is thinking about "contributing to the development of the linguistic tools associated to the FRANTEXT database and getting teachers, researchers and students to know them." In her e-mail of June 11, 1998, she also explained the changes brought by the Internet in her professional life:

"As I was more specially assigned to the development of textual databases at the INaLF, I had to explore the websites giving access to electronic texts and test them. I became a 'textual tourist' with the good and bad sides of this activity. The tendency to go quickly from one link to another, and to skip through the information, was a permanent danger -- it is necessary to target what you are looking for if you don't want to lose your time. The use of the Web totally changed my working methods -- my investigations are not only bookish and within a narrow circle anymore, on the contrary they are expanding thanks to the electronic texts available on the Internet."

The ARTFL Project (ARTFL: American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language) is a cooperative project established in 1981 by the Institut national de la langue française (INaLF) (National Institute of the French Language, based in France) and the Division of the Humanities of the University of Chicago. Its purpose is to be a research tool for scholars and students in all areas of French studies.

The origin of the project is a 1957 initiative of the French government to create a new dictionary of the French language, the Trésor de la Langue Française (Treasure of the French Language). In order to provide access to a large body of word samples, it was decided to transcribe an extensive selection of French texts for use with a computer. Twenty years later, a corpus totaling some 150 million words had been created, representing a broad range of written French -- from novels and poetry to biology and mathematics -- stretching from the 17th to the 20th centuries.

This corpus of French texts was an important resource not only for lexicographers, but also for many other types of humanists and social scientists engaged in French studies -- on both sides of the Atlantic. The result of this realization was the ARTFL Project, as explained on its website:

"At present the corpus consists of nearly 2,000 texts, ranging from classic works of French literature to various kinds of non-fiction prose and technical writing. The eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries are about equally represented, with a smaller selection of seventeenth century texts as well as some medieval and Renaissance texts. We have also recently added a Provençal database that includes 38 texts in their original spellings. Genres include novels, verse, theater, journalism, essays, correspondence, and treatises. Subjects include literary criticism, biology, history, economics, and philosophy. In most cases standard scholarly editions were used in converting the text into machine-readable form, and the data contain page references to these editions."

One of the largest of its kind in the world, the ARTFL database permits both the rapid exploration of single texts, and the inter-textual research of a kind. ARTFL is now on the Web, and the system is available through the Internet to its subscribers. Access to the database is organized through a consortium of user institutions, in most cases universities and colleges which pay an annual subscription fee.

The ARTFL Encyclopédie Project is currently developing an on-line version of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, including all 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates from the first edition, that is to say about 18,000 pages of text and exactly 20,736,912 words.

Published under the direction of Diderot between 1751 and 1772, the Encyclopédie counted as contributors the most prominent philosophers of the time: Voltaire, Rousseau, d'Alembert, Marmontel, d'Holbach, Turgot, etc.