The Internet might be a global medium, but a central barrier of daily communication remains decidedly local: language. For two polyglot entrepreneurs at Vienna-based Multicity.com, this fact is an opportunity rather than a frustration.

Patrick and Alain Hanash, born to a French mother and a Lebanese-American father, have always felt comfortable speaking French, English and a little Arabic. Boarding school, with students from many cultures, in southern France only reinforced their cosmopolitan attitudes, but foreshadowed a rude awakening when they returned to the United States.

"It was pure culture shock," said Alain Hanash, the company's chief executive officer. "The United States is very English-centric."

So, Multicity became the digital equivalent of a diverse boarding school, an Internet site where people from different backgrounds can chat, but with the added twist that on-the-fly translation would facilitate conversations between people who did not share a common language.

"We are all about the globalization of communications," said Mr. Hanash, 30.

And the company is "growing like a weed," said Jim Backus, who heads Draper Atlantic Ventures, the Reston-based venture capital fund backing Multicity. The firm has not disclosed its financials, but Multicity has gone from having a skeleton staff at the beginning of the year to 35 employees in its Vienna offices.

The timing of the Hanash brothers appears fortuitous. Internet use, still heavily concentrated in the United States and other English-speaking countries, is escalating rapidly in nations of many tongues. Research by E-Marketer 2000 suggests that the Asia-Pacific region, for example, could have as many as 96 million active adult Internet users by 2003, up from only 22 million in 1999.

The essence of Multicity is a business-to-business strategy that focuses on licensing the chat-room technologies to other companies who want to use it to generate interest in their products among consumers around the world. Crucially, Multicity has eschewed the path of trying to market its brand directly to millions of consumers, a time-consuming and expensive proposition for any company, let alone a start-up.

"We have to be a pure B-to-B company," said Patrick Hanash, 32, the company's president. "We are not chasing after the end-users."

Trimark Pictures, for example, has used Multicity technology on its own Web site to let the global audience of future ticket-buyers discuss the films in advance.

Companies or individuals that might not be able to afford Multicity.com's products can obtain the service anyway, provided they agree to split revenues that come from banner advertisments on their own Web sites.

Critical to the company's product is its partnership with Systran, a French company that has developed translation software. In a typical chat room that uses Multicity technology, users can choose the languages in which they want to send and receive their messages. Translations typically come quickly, though on sites with heavy traffic they sometimes fail to materialize.

But despite the stunning advances in language technologies over the past 20 years, translation software is not perfect by any means.

In one chat room that uses Multicity.com's technology, for example, the word "fine," a standard response to the question "How are you?" was translated into German as "Geldstrafe." But this word refers to the type of "fine" paid to the Department of Motor Vehicles, not state of mind.

"The translations are not perfect," Alain Hanash concedes. "But we have dramatically lowered the barrier to effective communication."

© 2000, by News World Communications, Inc.