tely essential, as in the long run I don't think that it is a
healthy situation when only those who have a reasonable command of
English can fully exploit the benefits of the web. 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."

Steven added in August 1999: "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 put it
mildly), it's surprising to see that I still manage to communicate
successfully by combining my poor French with gestures, facial
expressions, visual clues and diagrams. I think the web (as opposed to
old-fashioned text-only email) offers excellent opportunities to
exploit the fact that transmission of information via different
channels (or modalities) can still work, even if the process is only
partially successful for each of the channels in isolation."

What practical solutions would he suggest for a truly multilingual web?
"At the author end: better education of web authors to use combinations
of modalities to make communication more effective across language
barriers (and not just for cosmetic reasons). At the server end: more
translation facilities a la AltaVista (quality not impressive, but
always better than nothing). At the browser end: more integrated
translation facilities (especially for the smaller languages), and more
quick integrated dictionary lookup facilities."

Linguistic pluralism and diversity are everybody's business, as
explained in a petition launched by the European Committee for the
Respect of Cultures and Languages in Europe (ECRCLE) "for a humanist
and multilingual Europe, rich of its cultural diversity": "Linguistic
pluralism and diversity are not obstacles to the free circulation of
men, ideas, goods and services, as would like to suggest some objective
allies, consciously or not, of the dominant language and culture.
Indeed, standardization and hegemony are the obstacles to the free
blossoming of individuals, societies and the information economy, the
main source of tomorrow's jobs. On the contrary, the respect for
languages is the last hope for Europe to get closer to the citizens, an
objective always claimed and almost never put into practi