ed 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 tech