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 t