et a
usable but imperfect machine-translated result which may be very helpful, but
will never have the same quality as a translation prepared by a human translator
with special knowledge of the subject and the contents of the site.

The increase in multilingual sites will make it possible to include more diverse
languages on the Internet. And more free translation software will improve
communication among everyone in the international Internet community.

In Web embraces language translation, an article published in ZDNN (ZD Network
News) of July 21, 1998, Martha L. Stone explained:

"This year, the number of new non-English websites is expected to outpace the
growth of new sites in English, as the cyber world truly becomes a 'World Wide
Web'. [...] According to Global Reach, the fastest growing groups of Web newbies
are non-English-speaking: Spanish, 22.4 percent; Japanese, 12.3 percent; German,
14 percent; and French, 10 percent. An estimated 55.7 million people access the
Web whose native language is not English. [...] Only 6 percent of the world
population speaks English as a native language (16 percent speak Spanish), while
about 80 percent of all web pages are in English."

Robert Ware is the creator of OneLook Dictionaries, a fast finder for 2,061,220
words in 432 dictionaries (as of December 10, 1998) in various fields: business;
computer/Internet; medical; miscellaneous; religion; science; sports;
technology; general; and slang. In his e-mail to me of September 2, 1998, he
wrote:

"An interesting thing happened earlier in the history of the Internet and I
think I learned something from it.

In 1994, I was working for a college and trying to install a software package on
a particular type of computer. I located a person who was working on the same
problem and we began exchanging email. Suddenly, it hit me... the software was
written only 30 miles away but I was getting help from a person half way around
the world. Distance and geography no longer mattered!

OK, this is great! But what is it leading to? I am only able to communicate in
English but, fortunately, the other person could use English as well as German
which was his mother tongue. The Internet has removed one barrier (distance) but
with that comes the barrier of language.

It seems that the Internet is moving people in two quite different directions at
the same time. The Internet (initially based on English) is connecting people
all around the wo