[Summary]
Project Gutenberg is a visionary project launched by Michael Hart
in July 1971 to create free electronic versions of literary works
and disseminate them worldwide. In 2010, Project Gutenberg offered
more than 33,000 high-quality ebooks being downloaded by the tens
of thousands every day, and websites in the United States,
Australia, Europe and Canada, with 40 mirror sites worldwide.
Project Gutenberg mainly offers ebooks in English, but
multilingualism has been one of its priorities since the late
1990s. French is the second language of the project. There were
ebooks in 60 languages in December 2010, thanks to the patient
work of Distributed Proofreaders, a website created in 2000 to
share the proofreading of ebooks between hundreds of volunteers in
many countries.
***
Project Gutenberg is a visionary project launched in July 1971 by
Michael Hart to create free electronic versions of literary works
and disseminate them worldwide. In the 15th century, Gutenberg
allowed anyone to have print books for a small cost. In the 21th
century, Project Gutenberg would allow anyone to have a digital
library at no cost.
Michael worked from Illinois, typing in books from public domain,
for example the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, first
alone, then with the help of a few volunteers.
His project got a major boost with the invention of the web in
1990. 95% of internet users were native English speakers in the
mid-1990s, so most books were in English.
Project Gutenberg was also inspiring other digital libraries in
Europe. Projekt Runeberg was launched in Sweden in 1994 to
digitize Nordic (Scandinavian) literature from public domain.
Projekt Gutenberg-DE was launched in Germany in 1994 to digitize
German literature from public domain.
French was the second language of Project Gutenberg, and still is
now. The first ebooks released in French were six works by
Stendhal and two works by Jules Verne, all released in early 1997.
Three novels by Jules Verne were already available in English in
1994. Since then, Jules Verne has always stayed on the top list of
the most downloaded authors.
In October 1997, Michael Hart wrote about producing more works in
other languages than English in the Project Gutenberg newsletter.
In early 1998, on top of ten French ebooks, there were a few
ebooks in German, Italian, Spanish and Latin. Released in May 1999,
eBook #2000 was “Don Quijote” (1605), by Cervantes, in Spanish,
its original language. In July 1999, Michael wrote in an email
interview: "I am publishing in one new language per month right
now, and will continue as long as possible."
The project got a new boost with the launching of Distributed
Proofreaders, a website created in October 2000 by Charles Franks
to share the proofreading of ebooks between hundreds of volunteers
living in many countries.
Released in April 2002, eBook #5000 was “The Notebooks of Leonardo
da Vinci” (written in the early 16th century), as an English
translation from Italian, its original language. Since its release,
it has regularly stayed in the top 100 downloaded ebooks.
There were works in 25 languages in early 2004, in 42 languages in
July 2005, including Sanskrit and the Mayan languages, and in 59
languages in October 2010. The ten main languages were English
(with 28,441 ebooks on 7 October 2010), French (1,659 ebooks),
German (709 ebooks), Finnish (536 ebooks), Dutch (496 ebooks),
Portuguese (473 ebooks), Chinese (405 ebooks), Spanish (295
ebooks), Italian (250 ebooks), and Greek (101 ebooks). The next
languages were Latin, Esperanto, Swedish and Tagalog.
When machine translation will be judged 99% satisfactory, we may
be able to read literary classics in a choice of many languages.
The machine translated ebooks won't compete with the work of
literary translators and their labor of love during days and
months if not years, but they will allow readers to get the gist
of some literary works that have never been translated so far, or
only translated in a few languages for commercial reasons.
The output of translation software could then be proofread by
human translators, in a similar way the output of OCR software is
proofread by the volunteers of Distributed Proofreaders. So, may
be, we will see the creation of Distributed Translators one day,
as a partner or sister project of Distributed Proofreaders and
Project Gutenberg.