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Marcel Grangier was the head of the French Section of Central
Linguistic Services, which means he was in charge of organizing
translation matters into French for the linguistic services of the
Swiss government. He wrote in January 1999: "Our website was first
conceived as an intranet service for translators in Switzerland, who
often deal with the same kind of material as the Federal government's
translators. Some parts of it are useful to any translators, wherever
they are. The section "Dictionnaires Electroniques" is only one section
of the website. Other sections deal with administration, law, the
French language, and general information. The site also hosts the pages
of the Conference of Translation Services of European States (COTSOES).
(...) To work without the internet is simply impossible now. Apart from
all the tools used (email, the electronic press, services for
translators), the internet is for us a vital and endless source of
information in what I'd call the 'non-structured sector' of the web.
For example, when the answer to a translation problem can't be found on
websites presenting information in an organized way, in most cases
search engines allow us to find the missing link somewhere on the
network."

How about the future? "We can see multilingualism on the internet as a
happy and irreversible inevitability. So we have to laugh at the
doomsayers who only complain about the supremacy of English. Such
supremacy isn't wrong in itself, because it is mainly based on
statistics (more PCs per inhabitant, more people speaking English,
etc.). The answer isn't to 'fight English', much less whine about it,
but to build more sites in other languages. As a translation service,
we also recommend that websites be multilingual. (...) The increasing
number of languages on the internet is inevitable and can only boost
multicultural exchanges. For this to happen in the best possible
circumstances, we still need to develop tools to improve compatibility.
Fully coping with accents and other characters is only one example of
what can be done."

The section "Dictionnaires Electroniques" was later transfered on the
website of the Conference of Translation Services of European States
(COTSOES), when COTSOES launched its own website.

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Robert B