realized that, although English may stay the main
international language for exchanges of all kinds, not everyone
in the world reads English and, even so, people prefer to read
information in their own language. To reach as large an
audience as possible, companies and organizations needed to
offer bilingual, trilingual, even multilingual websites, while
adapting their content to a given audience. Thus the need of
both internationalization and localization, which became a
major trend in the following years, not only in the U.S. but in
many countries, where foreign companies set up bilingual
websites - in their language and in English - to reach a wider
audience, and get more clients.

Translation software available on the web was far from perfect,
but was helpful, because instantaneous and free, unlike a high-
quality professional translation. In December 1997, AltaVista,
a leading search engine, was the first to launch such software
with Babel Fish - also called AltaVista Translation -, which
could translate webpages (up to three pages at the same time)
from English into French, German, Italian, Portuguese or
Spanish, and vice versa. The software was developed by Systran,
a company specializing in machine translation. This initiative
was followed by others, with free and/or paid versions on the
web, developed by Alis Technologies, Globalink, Lernout &
Hauspie, IBM (with the WebSphere Translation Server),
Softissimo, Champollion, TMX or Trados.

Brian King, director of the WorldWide Language Institute
(WWLI), brought up the concept of "linguistic democracy" in
September 1998: "Whereas 'mother-tongue education' was deemed a
human right for every child in the world by a UNESCO report in
the early '50s, 'mother-tongue surfing' may very well be the
Information Age equivalent. If the internet is to truly become
the Global Network that it is promoted as being, then all
users, regardless of language background, should have access to
it. To keep the internet as the preserve of those who, by
historical accident, practical necessity, or political
privilege, happen to know English, is unfair to those who
don't."

Jean-Pierre Cloutier was the editor of "Chroniques de Cyberie",
a weekly French-language online report of internet news. He
wrote in August 1999: "We passed a milestone this summer. Now
more than half the users of the internet live outside the
United States. Next year, more than half of all users will be
non Englis