For software suppliers in Europe, the decline of the hegemony of the English language amongst computer users is one of the most significant features of the new business landscape. This is not a result of inter-European trade, of course; but coupled with these economic trends, it is of immense importance. Ovum has been following the fortunes of research in natural language for nearly ten years, and especially of the practical applications that have grown out of that research. We track user needs for a wide range of emerging technologies, but the gap between what the user community needs, and what the IT industry can supply, is more pronounced in language technology than in any of the other areas we follow. And while this is easy to explain - by the difficulty of natural language processing, and the complexity of myriad language combinations - it also highlights the urgent need to improve linguistic support for all kinds of software products.

English no longer dominates the world of computing the way it did a generation ago. From the end user perspective, this fact has been evident for some time. But even across the technical divide, DP and MIS managers throughout Europe tell us that the new generations of technicians and engineers have largely been trained in their native languages - not in the back rooms of large computer installations, in the arcane lingua franca of proprietary operating environments. Moreover, the world is no longer neatly divided between users and technical systems staff. Layers of applications development now lie between the code and the user's screen. Users are often programmers, and vice versa. The result is that the demand for localized software products is increasingly strong. Translation is a requirement for practical, as well as statutory, reasons.

Localization is, at present, principally oriented to single language environments, since the goal is to provide access to tools and resources in the native language of the users of products. While many languages are "targets" for localization, the focus is on matching languages to markets to enhance the usability of products.

At the national level, this strategy promotes the operational effectiveness of businesses and administrations. But in the long run, localization will need to give way to multilinguality in European IT. This is the only condition under which a unified single market can be achieved which is comparable in strength to that of North America. Language technology will increasingly support the localization effort without doubt. At Ovum, we believe the language industries should also support moves to genuine multilinguality.

The increased need for access to IT in multiple languages is directly proportional to the extent to which the IT paradigm is text-based. Emerging models of enterprise computing focus on what we might, for want of a better term, call the conceptual document. This is a collection of information pieces which can, with standard technology, already contain data and graphical material (pulled in - sometimes "manually" - from databases or spreadsheets or graphics programs). Increasingly these documents will contain more sophisticated information pieces such as voice annotation, animation or video. As documents become richer information resources, they become more central to IT. And as text becomes more central to IT systems, multiple language access becomes critical.

The text-based IT paradigm is now feasible because the networking infrastructure is being developed to transcend the tyranny of "personal productivity". The new goal for IT users is group productivity. The veterans in our midst may demur, noting that group productivity was the always and original goal of information systems. What has changed is the quality of the media through which users employ IT. Data processing and word processing have given way to genuine information processing, and the medium is language, both written and spoken.

As IT more nearly emulates natural communication modes, language issues come to the foreground. In Europe, multiple languages and multiple cultures challenge the ability of suppliers to support these natural modes. The single market will succeed only as a multilingual market. Caveat Vendor!