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It seems hard to believe, but just five years ago,
most people had never even heard of the internet. Today,
it's everywhere. E-mail has surpassed regular mail in volume
and the number of web pages is nearing 400 million.
In 1998, the online world crossed another important mile-stone.
For the first time, the number of users living outside
the U.S. was more than the number in the U.S. The world
has certainly embraced the internet. Over the next decade,
new users will become a far more worldly and multilingual lot.
Already, more than 150 countries have direct access to
the internet, and according to industry statistics, the growth
of users around the globe will more than double over the
next few years to nearly 150 million in 2002. Even more
compelling, most of that growth will come from outside the
U.S. Users in Asia and the Pacific Rim including Japan,
Taiwan, Australia, Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong will
have far greater access in the next few years. In Europe,
Scandinavia has already taken the lead for internet growth.
In Finland, for instance, there are 62 internet host comput-ers
for each 1,000 people, roughly twice the proportion in
the United States.
Most internet content is in English
With all this growth in internet access, one problem will
loom larger — language. Today, more than 80 percent of the
information on the Internet is in English, a challenge for all
the new non-English-speaking users. As the Web becomes
more and more a forum for the global village, it promises to
become more of an electronic tower of Babel as more and
more content goes online in more and more languages.
Already, email, which has become the lifeline for the business
world, is helpless in overcoming our basic problems of not
understanding each other's languages.
Helpless that is, until the arrival of the newest generation of
machine translation software. These new programs can con-vert
incoming and outgoing email, chat room, and newsgroup
messages on-the-fly; they can instantly translate the content
of any Web page, or they can perform multilingual searches for
information regardless what language the data is in.
Machine translation technology is here
What machine translation does is automatically convert the
meaning of words from one language to another. Traditionally,
translation has been done by human linguists and the process
has always been thought of as very dependent on the skills and
sensibilities of the translator. A first-year Spanish student
could accurately translate a simple sentence but will have
trouble capturing the nuances of more complex language such
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