Nothing could or should be more multilingual than the Internet, but a majority of all information, messages, and data published and transferred through it is in English. How does the Internet community cope with problems concerning the exchange of information in different languages? Switzerland with its four official national languages and therefore especially its public administration, is a very good example to show the importance of using different languages while offering information through the World Wide Web (Web). The same is true for other European - or worldwide organisations such as the European Union (EU), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as well as the International Union of Forestry Research Organizations (IUFRO). The support of multilingual documents by HTML 4 is another important aspect of multilingualism on the Web.
Ideas and concepts that have been developed to support multilingual use in the interactive setting (exchange of information) of the Web4Groups (groupware) will show the importance and difficulties to support multilingual use of the Internet. Another promising and growing field is that of automatic translation. Some examples illustrate how translation tools work and indicate their current limits.