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Peter Raggett, deputy-head (and then head) of the Central Library at the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), wrote in August 1999:  “I think it is incumbent on European organizations and businesses to try and offer websites in three or four languages if resources permit.  In this age of globalization and electronic commerce, businesses are finding that they are doing business across many countries.  Allowing French, German, Japanese speakers to easily read one’s website as well as English speakers will give a business a competitive edge in the domain of electronic trading.”

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In 1999, the subtitle of Babel’s website was:  “Towards communicating on the internet in any language...”  Babel was a joint project from Alis Technologies and the Internet Society to contribute to the internationalization of the internet.  Babel offered a multilingual website (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish), with information about the world’s languages, and a typographical and linguistic glossary.  “The Internet and Multilingualism” section gave information on how to develop a multilingual website, and how to code the “world’s writing”.

Bill Dunlap, founder of Euro-Marketing Associates, a company based in San Francisco and Paris, launched the international marketing consultancy Global Reach as a methodology for U.S. companies to expand their internet presence into an international framework.  This included translating a website into other languages, actively promoting it, and using local online banner advertising to increase local website traffic.

Bill Dunlap explained in December 1998:  “Promoting your website is at least as important as creating it, if not more important.  You should be prepared to spend at least as much time and money in promoting your website as you did in creating it in the first place.  With the Global Reach program, you can have it promoted in countries where English is not spoken, and achieve a wider audience... and more sales.  There are many good reasons for taking the online international market seriously.  Global Reach is a means for you to extend your website to many countries, speak to online visitors in their own language and reach online markets there. (...)

Since 1981, when my professional life started, I’ve been involved with bringing American companies in Europe.  This is very much an issue of language, since the products and their marketing have to be in the languages of Europe in order for them to be visible here.  Since the web became popular in 1995 or so, I’ve turned these activities to their online dimension, and have come to champion European e-commerce among my fellow American compatriots.  Most lately at Internet World in New York, I spoke about European e-commerce and how to use a website to address the various markets in Europe.”

Bill added in July 1999:  “After a website’s home page is available in several languages, the next step is the development of content in each language.  A webmaster will notice which languages draw more visitors (and sales) than others, and these are the places to start in a multilingual web promotion campaign.  At the same time, it is always good to increase the number of languages available on a website:  just a home page translated into other languages would do for a start, before it becomes obvious that more should be done to develop a certain language branch on a website.”

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in October 1994 to develop interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) for the web, for example specifications for markup languages (html, xml, and others), and to act as a forum for information, commerce, communication and collective understanding.  In 1998, the section Internationalization/Localization gave a definition of protocols used for internationalization/localization:  HTML, base character set, new tags and attributes, http, language negotiation, URLs & other identifiers including non-ASCII characters, etc.  It also offered some help with creating a multilingual website.

The Localisation Industry Standards Association (lisa) was created in the mid-1990s as a forum for “software publishers, hardware manufacturers, localization service vendors, and an increasing number of companies from related it sectors.”  Lisa has defined its mission as “promoting the localization and internationalization industry and providing a mechanism and services to enable companies to exchange and share information on the development of processes, tools, technologies and business models connected with localization, internationalization and related topics”.  Its website was first housed and maintained by the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Launched in January 1999 by the European Commission, the website HLTCentral (HLT:  Human Language Technologies) gave a short definition of language engineering:  “Through language engineering we can find ways of living comfortably with technology.  Our knowledge of language can be used to develop systems that recognize speech and writing, understand text well enough to select information, translate between different languages, and generate speech as well as the printed world.  By applying such technologies we have the ability to extend the current limits of our use of language.  Language enabled products will become an essential and integral part of everyday life.”