Most content on the Web today is in English, but the majority of the Earth's peoples speak languages other than English. To reach a wider audience, future Web sites will have to be multilingual, changing a Web site from one that is American-centric and single-language to one that is globally-oriented and multilingual. While the challenges in creating and maintaining a high-quality Web site in a single language are considerable, working with multiple languages simultaneously creates special challenges, both culturally and technically. But the results are well-worth the effort.

The beginning of the new millennium provides a singular opportunity to view Web sites in a new perspective: as a vehicle for truly global communication. One of the original goals of the Web was to create a new medium for communication that was truly universal. All users, regardless of their background and origin, should be able to experience the Web with equal results in terms of content impact without the limits of specialised equipment.

Most content on the Web today is in English, but the majority of the Earth's peoples speak language other than English. It is projected that the surge in online users in the coming years - from China in particular - will have a dramatic impact on the very nature of the Web itself. Therefore, it seems clear that English-only Web sites will soon become a limiting factor in the intellectual exchange of ideas and information.

For example, consider non-English speaking people living and working in the Pacific Rim. For them, opportunities for cultural exchange and technological advancement are often limited to sources of information available in their native language. For example, new stories, new developments in computing, and social impacts of world-wide events can only be consumed by Chinese-speaking people if the content is made available in Chinese. The translation from English to Chinese can be a long-term affair, resulting in the delivery of timely information by traditional means, such as printed books, that is "stale" by the time it reaches the consumer. By making the sources of this information available in Chinese as well as English over the Web, the delay in getting this information from producer to consumer can be eliminated.

Similarly, for content developers in China, their market is currently limited primarily to the Pacific Rim nations. If they were able to make their results more widely available, in English over the Web, then they could reach a much broader set of potential contacts and customers. By making the process of creating and maintaining multilingual Web sites easier for non-computer scientists, the opportunities for global communication are increased dramatically. This too addresses the original goal of the Web, as stated above.

Multilingual Web sites are fraught with both cultural issues and technical challenges. For example, there are cultural issues that must be addressed related to pre-conceived notions of universal design criteria. There may also be social conventions and linguistic or religious laws that must be adhered to.

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