The internet could also be a tool to develop a "cultural identity". During the Symposium on Multimedia Convergence organized by the International Labor Office (ILO) in January 1997, Shinji Matsumoto, general secretary of the Musicians' Union of Japan (MUJ), explained: "Japan is quite receptive to foreign culture and foreign technology. (...) Foreign culture is pouring into Japan and, in fact, the domestic market is being dominated by foreign products. Despite this, when it comes to preserving and further developing Japanese culture, there has been insufficient support from the government. (...) With the development of information networks, the earth is getting smaller and it is wonderful to be able to make cultural exchanges across vast distances and to deepen mutual understanding among people. We have to remember to respect national cultures and social systems." As the internet quickly spread worldwide, more and more people in the U.S. realized that, although English may stay the main international language for exchanges of all kinds, not everyone in the world reads English and, even so, people prefer to read information in their own language. To reach as large an audience as possible, companies and organizations needed to offer bilingual, trilingual, even multilingual websites, while adapting their content to a given audience. Thus the need of both internationalization and localization, which became a major trend in the following years, not only in the U.S. but in many countries, where foreign companies set up bilingual websites - in their language and in English - to reach a wider audience, and get more clients. Translation software available on the web was far from perfect, but was helpful, because instantaneous and free, unlike a high- quality professional translation. In December 1997, AltaVista, a leading search engine, was the first to launch such software with Babel Fish - also called AltaVista Translation -, which could translate webpages (up to three pages at the same time) from English into French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish, and vice versa. The software was developed by Systran, a company specializing in machine translation. This initiative was followed by others, with free and/or paid versions on the web, developed by Alis Technologies, Globalink, Lernout & Hauspie, IBM (with the WebSphere Translation Server), Softissimo, Champollion, TMX or Trados.