The Project Gutenberg EBook of Multilingualism on the Web, by Marie Lebert

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Title: Multilingualism on the Web

Author: Marie Lebert

Release Date: October 26, 2008 [EBook #27028]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MULTILINGUALISM ON THE WEB ***

Produced by Al Haines

MULTILINGUALISM ON THE WEB

MARIE LEBERT

CEVEIL, Montreal, 1999 & NEF, University of Toronto, 2001

Copyright (C) 1999 Marie Lebert

Dated February 1999, this study is divided into four parts: Multilingualism,
Language Resources, Translation Resources and Language-Related Research. It is
based on many interviews. With many thanks to Laurie Chamberlain, who kindly
edited this paper. This study is also available in French: Le multilinguisme sur
le web. The original versions are available on the NEF, University of Toronto:
http://www.etudes-francaises.net/entretiens/multi.htm

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. Multilingualism

3. Language Resources

4. Translation Resources

5. Language-Related Research

6. Index of Websites

7. Index of Names

1. INTRODUCTION

It is true that the Internet transcends limitations of time, distances and
borders, but what about languages?

From the beginning, the main language of the Internet has been English, and it
still is today, but the use of other languages is steadily increasing. Sooner or
later, the distribution of languages on the Internet will correspond to the
language distribution on the planet, and free translation software in all
languages will be available for an instantaneous translation of any website. But
there is still a lot to do before multilingualism can be really effective.

This study is divided into four parts: Multilingualism; Language Resources;
Translation Resources; and Language-Related Research.

In the chapter about multilingualism, we will study the growth of non-English
languages on the Internet. French will be taken as an example, and the efforts
in the European Union relating to the diversi