The printed word can't be replaced, at least not in the foreseeable future. The paper book is a wonderful thing. We can't leaf through an electronic text in the same way. But we can find words and groups of words much more quickly. We can read an electronic text more carefully, even with the inconvenience of reading it on the screen. It is less expensive and can be more easily distributed worldwide (not counting the cost of the computer and Internet connection). = How did using the Internet change your professional life? The Internet has been personally very important for me. It's become the centre of my life. It's meant that our organization can now communicate with thousands of people -- something we couldn't have afforded if we'd published a paper magazine. I think the Internet is going to be the chief means of communication and exchanging information in the future. RANDY HOBLER [EN, FR] [EN] Randy Hobler (Dobbs Ferry, New York) #Internet Marketing Consultant, among others at Globalink, a company specialized in language translation software and services Randy Hobler has been a consultant in Internet& marketing at IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Burroughs Wellcome, Pepsi, Heublein, etc. In 1998, he was an Internet Marketing Consultant for Globalink, a company specialized in language translation software and services. He wrote: "The joy for me is the ability to combine my vocational skills in high-tech and marketing with avocational interests like language into one. To love what you do and do what you love." Globalink was bought by Lernout & Hauspie in 1999. [Interview 03/09/1998 // Interview 10/09/2000] *Interview of September 3, 1998 = How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web? 85% of the content of the Web in 1998 is in English and going down. This trend is driven not only by more websites and users in non-English-speaking countries, but by increasing localization of company and organization sites, and increasing use of machine translation to/from various languages to translate websites. Because the Internet has no national boundaries, the organization of users is bounded by other criteria driven by the medium itself. In terms of multilingualism, you have virtual communities, for example, of what I call "Language Nations"... all those people on the Internet wherever they may be, for whom a given language is their native language. Thus, the Spanish Language nation includes not only Spanish and Latin American users, but millions of Hispanic users in the US, as well as odd places like Spanish-speaking Morocco. = Can you tell us about the future of machine translation?