ulation speaks English as a native language (16 percent speak Spanish), while
about 80 percent of all web pages are in English."

According to Global Reach, 92% of the world does not speak English. As the Web
quickly spreads worldwide, more and more operators of English-language sites
which are concerned by the internationalization of the Web recognize that,
although English may be the main international language for exchanges of all
kinds, not everyone in the world reads English.

Since December 1997 any Internet surfer can use the AltaVista Translation
service, which translates English web pages (up to three pages at the same time)
into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, and vice versa. The
Internet surfer can also buy and use Web translation software. In both cases he
will get a usable but imperfect machine-translated result which may be very
helpful, but will never have the same quality as a translation prepared by a
human translator with special knowledge of the subject and the contents of the
site.

The increase in multilingual sites will make it possible to include more diverse
languages on the Internet. And more free translation software will improve
communication among everyone in the international Internet community.

To reach as large an audience as possible, the solution is to create bilingual,
trilingual, multilingual sites. The website of the Belgian daily newspaper Le
Soir gives a presentation of the newspaper in six languages: French, English,
Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish. The French Club des poetes (Club of Poets),
a French site dedicated to poetry, presents its site in English, Spanish and
Portuguese. E-Mail-Planet, a free e-mail address provider, provides a menu in
six languages (English, Finnish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish).

Robert Ware is the creator of OneLook Dictionaries, a fast finder for 2,058,544
words in 425 dictionaries in various fields: business, computer/Internet;
medical; miscellaneous; religion; science; sports; technology; general; and
slang. In his e-mail to me of September 2, 1998, he wrote:

"An interesting thing happened earlier in the history of the Internet and I
think I learned something from it.

In 1994, I was working for a college and trying to install a software package on
a particular type of computer. I located a person who was working on the same
problem and we began exchanging e-mail. Suddenly, it hit me... the software was
written