The next wave of web-induced change for the language industry appears to be driven with some help from its own constituencies. Players involved in natural language processing and web internationalization are investigating and advancing the web’s capabilities to support high-quality, large volume, effective and efficient processing in multilanguage contexts like translation. A point of convergence related to the possible forthcoming changes seems to be what’s currently termed the multilingual semantic web.

One possible approach for understanding the multilingual semantic web is to look at it from two complementary angles — namely that of the multilingual web on the one hand and the semantic web on the other hand. The multilingual web relates to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the web multilingually. Over the past two years, a network (multilingualweb.eu) of approximately 20 partners funded by the European Commission and coordinated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) organized a series of four events to look at best practices, standards and possible gaps in this area. . .