Once upon a time, one day of February 1982, my last year of studies in BA degree, Modern Languages in the Bourguiba Institute of modern languages in Tunis, I was consuming 100 grams of "glibettes" (grilled sunflower grains) that the merchant of the Liberty avenue in Tunis had served me, as it is still common to do it, wrapped in a paper cone torn off in an old newspaper. I was accustomed to not throwing the packing paper before reading its content by curiosity to discover any new and interesting topics to read. I kept this practice since childhood when I was serving my father customers as the district grocer, in papers of the magazines, reviews and newspapers bought in great quantities in the local suppliers for packing needs. That day, I was served in a paper sheet torn off in Dialogue, a national magazine of that time. The page contained an article in Arab language which posed the problems of the relationship between the Arab language and the Latin languages in terms of directionality of the writing and the system of decimal arithmetic counting. The detail did not pass without waking up in me a particular intrigue and a beginning of thought about the matter. It was the catch of a first series of interrogations which always accompanied me each time that it was a question of decimal numerical system or of composition of multilingual Arab-Latin texts. The bidirectional aspect of the writing was one of the polemics present in my way of apprehending the written forms and the algorithmic mechanisms of accountancy. It led me at the current state of research, which I try to describe in this summary : Intrigues of research and linguistic affinities were thus combined to delimit a field of investigation which was going to condition my future studies and research. 

Already, during the same year, carried by my enthusiasm for the courses of general linguistics which were given to us by Pr. Salem Ghazali, disciple of Chomsky, I crossed the first step towards the world of scientific research by completing an investigation work out of the official school program. It consisted to make analysis and to draw up statistics on the forms and the rates of phonological conversions in the morphological transliterations and loans between Arabic and the Latin languages like English and French. It was necessary to quantify and argue, using examples, why the phoneme "P" in the word "Pansement" is converted into informal Arabic into "F" as in the word "Fasma" whereas the same phoneme "P" in the word "Police" is converted into "B" as in the word "Boulis". Work had led to a handwritten document not yet published which could be shown one day for a better analysis of the question.  

Later, between 1983 and 1985, my third cycle studies in the Center of the Bibliographical and Documentary Studies, Madrid-Spain, in the discipline of Documentation, Library and Archival Sciences had allowed me to find again this interest for the Arab language and the linguistic problems which it presents in its generic aspects : the written form of the Arab language and its historical evolution. It was a one year research work realized in the specialty of history of the book and carried out under the supervision of Doña Maria Luísa López-Vidriero Abelló, the person in charge for the department of the manuscripts and the rare books of the national library of Spain. The study related to the graphic art in Oriental elementary education. It was a question of studying the historical evolution of the known pre-scholar Coranic institutions under the name of "Kuttab" and of evaluating their pedagogical approaches based on the rhetoric and their written graphic forms based on the very old models of the clay shelves and Qalams of bamboo used by all civilizations of the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin, in Mesopotamia, in old Egypt, in ancient Greece, in Rome and Byzance and in the Arab world. 

It was only after a whole decade later that I could find the occasion and the context to take again the initial problems of the bidirectionality and to be able to register them in a thorough and long-term research program. It was the thesis research work achieved between 1994 and 1999 at the University Michel de Montaigne of Bordeaux 3 within the Group of Experimental Research on the Computerized Systems of Communication (GRESIC). A new element was going to enter into account : New Communication and Information Technologies (NTIC) and their contributions to the mechanization of languages. All the polemic of the multilingualism that I study today associates Arab language and TIC in their various forms of interactions, the level of the information processing systems, the man-machine interfaces and the information contents. The whole is directed towards a well defined axis of study of the languages, that of the techniques of coding and forms of use for information and communication objectives, rather than of the phonemic and morphosyntaxic analysis which come under the fields of linguistic engineering and the language industry.