Wired:I'm in Montreal, the capital of Quebec, and slowly adjusting to a city that looks for all intents like one of its American counterparts - except for nods to strange commonwealthisms (Esso, not Exxon; serviettes, not napkins) and the rich French- Canadian accents spilling over the bars, restaurants and hotel lobbies, writes Danny O'Brien

This is the heart of Canada's bilingual belt, where two official languages live in an uneasy truce. Yet, despite all the battles over ensuring French primacy, almost every sign and every cereal box is in English and French - a courtesy one grows to appreciate the more one realises how rusty schoolboy French can become.

It wasn't always the case. In the 1990s, Canada had a slightly shaky initial ride into the world of the net. Québécois laws required that all local businesses used French. After a few misplaced lawsuits, the net was quietly conceded to be bilingual. That meant websites had to be in two languages which meant taking a lead in providing multiple languages at a time when the most of the web was English with hardly any of it designed to work in more than one language.

The hoops Canadian web-designers went through look, in retrospect, to have been planning for the future. English has been a minority language on the net since 2001, when the share of native English speakers online shrank to 45 per cent of the estimated 500 million users at that time. But software and web designers have spent a long time catching up. It's only recently that browsers have managed to handle Arabic successfully and few websites are translated into multiple languages.

That's a shame, because if your business really is international, presenting your works in a local language can help raise your profile.

Google is one of the few websites that automatically notes the inbuilt language settings of your browser and translates its entire site to your language when you visit it.

If you go to your web browser's preferences page and change to Russian, and then return to Google, you'll find it speaking Russian to you.

Google, of course, has the resources to translate into dozens of languages. It also prioritises native language sites in their searches which means that if you translate your website into another language, you'll appear higher up in Google searches.

It's still not easy to build internationalised websites. Popular content management systems struggle with the problem, and gathering and synchronising these translations can be a full-time task. The problem gets worse when you are dealing with multimedia. If text is a problem to translate, what about audio or video?

The website Dotsub is one attempt to fix this problem. Dotsub allows anyone to upload a video and affix a transcript. Native language speakers can add their own translations, which are added to the video stream as subtitles.

The wider point of Dotsub is that it encourages collaborative translations. Those who want to contribute can do so minimally, without much connection to the original project or the creator.

The open source movement has successfully worked to increase its international support over the last few years.

Much of its software and websites have the text separated from the main code and can be translated by anyone, not just programmers. The most notable advance in this area is by the major Linux distribution, Ubuntu, which uses its own software, Rosetta, to encourage volunteers to translate its thousands of packages of open source code into 170 languages.

In both cases, the translators are working for free on projects that also subsist on volunteer work. Their work is aimed at providing these resources to their own nationality: a mixture of altruism, nationalism and self-interest.

This is not potentially something that could work for small corporate sites, but for multi-nationals the idea of using their wide base of employees to allow ad-hoc translations might well be powerful.

Quality control, as ever on the net, is a problem. Hotchpotch translations often offend the sensibilities of those used to high-quality translations, or nothing at all. In a medium like the web, though, where informality is expected, even a small touch of internationalisation can go a long way.

Right now, the internet, and the software connected to it, is more like a set of walled cities, than a truly international communication medium.

There's very little that percolates, say, from the Chinese web, to the English- speaking world, but as the tools that make for easy or even automatic translation grow, we'll see more of these worlds blending together.

And, like the Francophone- proud but English-friendly businessmen of Montreal, it will benefit everyone to cater for as many languages as they can.