[Summary]
In December 1997, Logos, a global translation company based in
Modena, Italy, decided to put on the web for free the professional
tools used by its translators, for the internet community to be
able to use them as well. These tools were the Logos Dictionary, a
multilingual dictionary with 7.5 billion words (in fall 1998); the
Logos Wordtheque, a multilingual library with 328 billion words
extracted from translated novels, technical manuals, and other
texts; the Logos Linguistic Resources, a database of 553
glossaries; and the Logos Universal Conjugator, a database for
verbs in 17 languages. In 2007, the Logos Library (formerly
Wordtheque) included 710 billion words, Linguistic Resources (no
change of name) included 1,215 glossaries, and the Universal
Conjugator (formerly Conjugation of Verbs) included verbs in 36
languages.
***
In December 1997, Logos, a global translation company, decided to
put on the web all the professional tools used by its translators,
for the internet community to freely use them as well.
Logos was founded by Rodrigo Vergara in 1979, with headquarters in
Modena, Italy. In 1997, Logos had 300 in-house translators and
2,500 free-lance translators worldwide, who processed around 200
texts per day.
The linguistic tools available online were the Logos Dictionary, a
multilingual dictionary with 7.5 billion words (in fall 1998); the
Logos Wordtheque, a multilingual library with 328 billion words
extracted from translated novels, technical manuals, and other
texts, that could be searched by language, word, author or title;
the Logos Linguistic Resources, a database of 500 glossaries; and
the Logos Universal Conjugator, a database for verbs in 17
languages.
When interviewed by Annie Kahn in an article of the French daily
Le Monde dated 7 December 1997, Rodrigo Vergara, head of Logos,
explained: "We wanted all our translators to have access to the
same translation tools. So we made them available on the internet,
and while we were at it we decided to make the site open to the
public. This made us extremely popular, and also gave us a lot of
exposure. This move has in fact attracted many customers, and also
allowed us to widen our network of translators, thanks to contacts
made in the wake of the initiative."
In the same article, called “Les mots pour le dire” (The words to
tell it), Annie Kahn wrote: "The Logos site is much more than a
mere dictionary or a collection of links to other online
dictionaries. The cornerstone is the document search program,
which processes a corpus of literary texts available free of
charge on the web. If you search for the definition or the
translation of a word ('didactique', for example), you get not
only the answer sought, but also a quote from one of the literary
works containing the word (in our case, an essay by Voltaire). All
it takes is a click on the mouse to access the whole text or even
to order the book, including in foreign translations, thanks to a
partnership agreement with the famous online bookstore Amazon.com.
However, if no text containing the required word is found, the
program acts as a search engine, sending the user to other web
sources containing this word. In the case of certain words, you
can even hear the pronunciation. If there is no translation
currently available, the system calls on the public to contribute.
Everyone can make suggestions, after which Logos translators check
the suggested translations they receive."
Ten years later, in 2007, the Logos Library (formerly Wordtheque)
included 710 billion words, Linguistic Resources (no change of
name) included 1,215 glossaries, and the Universal Conjugator
(formerly Conjugation of Verbs) included verbs in 36 languages.