that there are so many
offerings in the original languages now. I much prefer to read the original with
difficulty than to get a bad translation."

According to Global Reach, only 15% of Europe's half a billion population speaks
English as a first language, and only 28% speaks English at all. A recent study
showed that only 32% of Web surfers on the European continent consult the Web in
English.

Founder of Euro-Marketing Associates (including Global Reach), Bill Dunlap, who
champions European e-commerce among his fellow American compatriates, explained
in his e-mail of December 12, 1998 that, contrary to North America, "in Europe
[...], the countries are small enough so that an international perspective has
been necessary for centuries."

There are many European organizations dealing with multilingualism, such as the
European Language Resources Association (ELRA), the European Network in Language
and Speech (ELSNET) and the Multilingual Information Society (MLIS) Programme of
the European Union.

The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) was established as a
non-profit organization in Luxembourg in February 1995. Its overall goal is to
provide a centralized organization for the validation, management, and
distribution of speech, text, and terminology resources and tools, and to
promote their use within the European telematics RTD (research and technological
development) community. Its website is bilingual English-French.

The European Network in Language and Speech (ELSNET) has over a hundred European
academic and industrial institutions as members. The long-term technological
goal which unites the participants of ELSNET is to build multilingual speech and
NL (natural language) systems with unrestricted coverage of both spoken and
written language.

In his e-mail of September 23, 1998, Steven Krauwer, ELSNET coordinator,
explained:

"-- as a European citizen I think that multilingualism on the Web is absolutely
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.

[The Internet] is my main instrument to communicate with others, and it is my
main source of information.