In March, Belgium’s Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo visited our Brussels headquarters to celebrate our partnership with the Mundaneum, a pioneering 1920's Belgian project that we see as, in many ways, an ancestor of Google.
This month marked the launch of our joint lecture series, with an evening exploring linguistic diversity on the Web.The Mundaneum’s headquarters in the southern Belgian city of Mons was packed for the first Google-sponsored lecture. I was privileged to introduce the main speaker Louis Pouzin , the inventor of the datagram and designer of an early packet communications network.
From Google’s perspective, the Net offers fantastic possibilities to promote local languages. Our Google Translate now serves 53 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish, including Basque, Gujarati, and Swahili. At the click of a computer mouse, web pages can be instantaneously translated, allowing anybody, anywhere, to understand a web page.
In other ways, too, Google is committed to reviving and promoting local culture. Our partnership with Mundaneum is part of a larger project to revive the memory of Europe’s computing pioneers. The next lecture at the Mundaneum is scheduled for this autumn. Robert Cailliau , a Belgian computer scientist who, together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee , developed the World Wide Web . We look forward to seeing you in Mons.
Posted by Thierry Geerts, Managing Director, Belgium
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