ers customized translation solutions built
around a range of software products, on-line options and professional
translation services. The company publishes language translation software
products in Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian and English, and finds
solutions to translation problems faced by individuals and small businesses, to
multinational corporations and governments (a stand-alone product that gives a
fast, draft translation or a full system to manage professional document
translations). Globalink explains its corporate information on its website as
follows:

"With Globalink's translation applications, the computer uses three sets of
data: the input text, the translation program and permanent knowledge sources
(containing a dictionary of words and phrases of the source language), and
information about the concepts evoked by the dictionary and rules for sentence
development. These rules are in the form of linguistic rules for syntax and
grammar, and some are algorithms governing verb conjugation, syntax adjustment,
gender and number agreement and word re-ordering.

Once the user has selected the text and set the machine translation process in
motion the program begins to match words of the input text with those stored in
its dictionary. Once a match is found, the application brings up a complete
record that includes information on possible meanings of the word and its
contextual relationship to other words that occur in the same sentence. The time
required for the translation depends on the length of the text. A three-page,
750-word document takes about three minutes to render a first draft
translation."

Randy Hobler is a Marketing Consultant for Globalink. He is currently acting as
the Product Marketing Manager for Globalink's suite of Internet based products
and services. In his e-mail of 3 September 1998, he wrote:

"85% of the content of the Web in 1998 is in English and going down. This trend
is driven not only by more websites and users in non-English-speaking countries,
but by increasing localization of company and organization sites, and increasing
use of machine translation to/from various languages to translate websites.

Because the Internet has no national boundaries, the organization of users is
bounded by other criteria driven by the medium itself. In terms of
multilingualism, you have virtual communities, for example, of what I call
'Language Nations'... all those people on the Inte