European researchers tackle language barriers on the Internet
Researchers from the Netherlands, France, Italy, Portugal and the UK have come together in a project to develop best practice guidelines for designing multilingual web sites. At present, the English language dominates the web, accounting for more than 80 per cent of the estimated 14 million web sites currently in existence. Only 43 per cent of the world's Internet users have English as their mother tongue, and the number of non-English Internet users is expected to rise to 65 per cent by 2003. Enterprise and Information Society Commissioner Erkki Liikanen highlighted the problem at a recent conference on competitiveness. Mr Liikanen called for action to increase the linguistic diversity of the web, saying the 'Internet must be mother tongue, must be culturally customised' if more people are to become users. The BabelWeb project, led by applied research company Eurescom, was carried out in collaboration with researchers from telecom companies in the Netherlands (KPN), France (France Telecom), Portugal (Portugal Telecom) Italy (Telecom Italia) and the UK (BT). Eurescom spokesman Milon Gupta said the project, which ended last year, had drawn up a 'cook book' of reliable guidelines for the design of multilingual web sites. One of the basic recommendations of the project is that multilingual features should be included in the planning of a web site from the outset, as changing a single language site to a multilingual format can cause serious structural problems. BabelWeb developed a three-tier structure for the construction of multilingual sites, starting with a contents database, then the overall structure, in which the content is organised, and finally the presentation of the multilingual contents on the users' screen. The project also investigated the use of automatic translation and summarisation tools as an alternative to human translators, which can prove costly in terms of both time and money. It found that the use of translation databases to support translators and web site managers could lead to savings of up to 20 per cent in some areas. The project also recognised, however, problems with the quality of automatic translation tools and the high level of expertise needed to implement them. Elisabeth den Os, who led the BabelWeb project, said 'the monopoly of the English language in the Internet world will soon be over.' Mr Gupta said that the increasing linguistic diversity of the web 'is a major trend' that looks set to increase, adding that 'in an age of globalisation, multinational companies want to improve the services they offer the user.' He explained that 'in order to overcome language barriers and cultural and social divides, we need multilingual web sites.'