Books and articles across borders and languages (1990-2015) [PDF] | Marie Lebert

"After Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web and gave his invention to the world, books and articles could be accessed more easily. New media, new bookstores and new libraries helped cross national borders. Authors and journalists started working together at a distance. Internet users who didn't have English as a mother tongue reached 5 percent in summer 1994, 20 percent in summer 1998, 50 percent in summer 2000, and 75 percent in summer 2015. Some of them could read English, others just got the gist of what they read, and a number of them couldn't read English at all. The web saw the rise of linguistic democracy and the development of "language nations", both large and small. Many dedicated people helped promoting their own language and culture, or the language and culture of others, while using English as a lingua franca. In a short time, they made the web truly multilingual, with bilingual or trilingual websites, language-related resources, reference dictionaries, multilingual encyclopedias and translation software. These people were linguists, authors, librarians, teachers, professors, researchers, computer programmers, marketing consultants, and so on. This book is based on many interviews conducted for several years in Europe, in the Americas, in Africa and in Asia...."