Multilingual Information Management: Current Levels and Future Abilities

The Internet is rapidly bringing to the foreground the need for people to be able to access and manage information in many different languages. Even in cases where people have been lucky enough to learn several languages, they will still need help in effectively participating in the global information society. There are simply too many different languages, and all of them are important to somebody. While machine translation has a long (over 50 year) history, computer technology now appears ready for the next great push in technology for multilingual information access and management, particularly over the World Wide Web. The European Commission and several US agencies are taking bold steps to encourage research and development in multilingual information technologies. Th