ersion 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 p