ce. The Union
must therefore give up privileging the language of one group." The full
text of the petition was available in the eleven official languages of
the European Union. Among other things, the petition asked the revisors
of the Treaty of the European Union to include the respect of national
cultures and languages in the text of the treaty, and the national
governments to "teach the youth at least two, and preferably three
foreign European languages; encourage the national audiovisual and
musical industries; and favour the diffusion of European works."

Henk Slettenhaar is a professor in communication technology at Webster
University in Geneva, Switzerland. Henk is a trilingual European. He is
Dutch, he teaches computer science in English, and he is fluent in
French as a resident in neighboring France. He has regularly insisted
on the need of bilingual websites, in the original language and in
English. He wrote in December 1998: "I see multilingualism as a very
important issue. Local communities which are on the web should use the
local language first and foremost for their information. If they want
to be able to present their information to the world community as well,
their information should be in English as well. I see a real need for
bilingual websites. (...) As far as languages are concerned, I am
delighted 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."

Henk added in August 1999: "There are two main categories of websites
in my opinion. The first one is the global outreach for business and
information. Here the language is definitely English first, with local
versions where appropriate. The second one is local information of all
kinds in the most remote places. If the information is meant for people
of an ethnic and/or language group, it should be in that language
first, with perhaps a summary in English. We have seen lately how
important these local websites are -- in Kosovo and Turkey, to mention
just the most recent ones. People were able to get information about
their relatives through these sites."

Marcel Grangier was the head of the French Section of the Swiss Federal
Government's Central Linguistic Services, which means he was in charge
of organizing translations into French for the Swiss government. He
wrote in January 1999: "We can see multilingualism on the internet as a
happy and irreversible