HISTORY OF T&I
Following the launch of the ‘World Wide Web’ (which became known as ‘the web’) – in 1990, users with a native language other than English reached 5 percent by 1994, 20 percent by 1998, 50 percent by 2000 and 75 percent by 2015. French translator and librarian Marie Lebert, currently based in Australia, has sought out some of the key people involved in this development.
To complain about the ‘supremacy’ of English is useless …
Hundreds of translators helped promote both their own and other languages and cultures – sometimes in their spare time, and often using English as a lingua franca – to ensure that the web developed into a truly multilingual resource.
They often teamed up with web and software developers, language teachers, librarians and various others to offer localised websites, online dictionaries, terminology databases, language reference tools, and other bilingual or plurilingual content.
I’ve interviewed some of these people over the intervening years – some in person and others by email – to find out how each contributed to today’s multilingual web. While their names are mostly unknown, their work was groundbreaking and laid the foundations of what is now a globally ubiquitous resource. This article is a tribute to their hard work and dedication.
Maria Victoria Marinetti, a Mexican chemical engineer who was working as a translator and a language teacher after migrating to France, summarised the issue in August 1999:
It is very important to be able to communicate in various languages. I would even say this is mandatory, because the information given on the internet is meant for the whole world, so why wouldn’t we get this information in our language or in the language we wish? Worldwide information, but no broad choice for languages, this would be quite a contradiction, wouldn’t it?
To complain about the ‘supremacy’ of English is useless, as explained in January 1999 by Marcel Grangier, head of the French Section of the Swiss Federal Government’s Central Linguistic Services:
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 is not wrong in itself, because it is mainly based on statistics (more PCs per inhabitant, more people speaking English, etc.). The answer is not to ‘fight’ English, much less whine about it, but to build more websites 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.
Many translators around the world participated in voluntary, collaborative online projects. For example, NetGlos – which stands for ‘Multilingual Glossary of Internet Terminology’ – was created in 1995 by the WorldWide Language Institute (WWLI). Netglos was available in 13 languages (Chinese, Croatian, Dutch/Flemish, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Maori, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish) in September 1998.
Brian King, then director of WWLI, explained in September 1998:
Much of the technical terminology on the web is still not translated into other languages. And as we found with NetGlos, the translation of these terms is not always a simple process … Our NetGlos project has depended on the goodwill of volunteer translators from Canada, the U.S., Austria, Norway, Belgium, Israel, Portugal, Russia, Greece, Brazil, New Zealand and other countries. I think the hundreds of visitors we get coming to the NetGlos pages every day is an excellent testimony to the success of these types of working relationships. I see the future depending even more on cooperative relationships, although not necessarily on a volunteer basis.
Regarding endangered languages, a good example of taking the matter into one’s own hands was set by the Gaelic community. Created in 1997, the bilingual Gaelic–English website of Sabhal Mòr Ostaig – a public higher education college on the island of Skye, Scotland – quickly became the main source of information on Gaelic, considered an endangered language. A dedicated web page offers a bilingual (Gaelic/English) index of online resources in all European minority languages that was the first of its kind. As stated by the site’s webmaster, Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle, in May 2001:
The internet speeds everything up. If people don’t care about preserving languages, the internet and accompanying globalisation will greatly speed their demise. If people do care about preserving them, the internet will be a tremendous help.
Michael Bauer, a freelance translator from English to Gaelic, has been a driving force behind online resources in Gaelic. His software localisation projects with fellow localiser GunChleoc (a pseudonym) included the Gaelic versions of the web browser Opera (as early as 2001), Google Chrome, OpenOffice, LibreOffice and Accentuate.us, and the Gaelic language packs for Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. In his spare time, Michael worked for ten years to offer a digital edition of Dwelly, the main Gaelic–English dictionary, before teaming up with software developer Will Robertson to maintain Am Faclair Beag, a bidirectional online dictionary incorporating Dwelly along with more modern content. As Bauer explained in 2015:
Free and open software has helped carve out more of a space on the web for Gaelic, and cooperating with commercial long-term partners is helping to produce some very useful enabling technologies … A central storage space for translations would be useful for localisation projects, with a shared translation memory, thus avoiding to endlessly retranslate the same terms, phrases and sentence segments. If the translations could be available from the same site, like a meta-Poodle [a community localisation server], everyone working for the revival of a minority language on the web would benefit from it.
According to Bauer, the situation is largely the same ten years later.
Marie’s interviews are available from Project Gutenberg, an online library of free eBooks, and you can find an extensive timeline (1990–2015) on Marie’s website.
French translator and librarian Marie Lebert holds a PhD in linguistics (digital publishing) from the Sorbonne, Paris. She has worked for international organisations in several countries, and is currently in Australia on a global talent visa. Marie’s research interests include translation and translators, with a focus on women translators, and in all her projects she aims to give a voice to the forgotten or bypassed. Her articles and ebooks are available free online in English, French and Spanish here.
Advertisement:
