[Summary]
The UNDL Foundation (UNDL: Universal Networking Digital Language)
was founded in January 2001 to develop and promote the UNL
(Universal Networking Language) project. The UNL project was
launched in 1996 as a major digital metalanguage project by the
Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) of the United Nations
University (UNU) in Tokyo, Japan. As explained in 1998 on the
bilingual English-Japanese website: "UNL is a language that --
with its companion 'enconverter' and 'deconverter' software --
enables communication among peoples of differing native languages.
It will reside, as a plug-in for popular web browsers, on the
internet, and will be compatible with standard network servers."
At the time, 120 researchers worldwide were working on a
multilingual project in 16 languages (Arabic, Brazilian, Chinese,
English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese,
Latvian, Mongolian, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Thai).
***
The UNDL Foundation (UNDL: Universal Networking Digital Language)
was founded in January 2001 to develop and promote the UNL
(Universal Networking Language) project.
The UNL project was launched in 1996 as a major digital
metalanguage project by the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) of
the United Nations University (UNU) in Tokyo, Japan.
As explained in 1998 on the bilingual English-Japanese website:
"UNL is a language that -- with its companion 'enconverter' and
'deconverter' software -- enables communication among peoples of
differing native languages. It will reside, as a plug-in for
popular web browsers, on the internet, and will be compatible with
standard network servers. The technology will be shared among the
member states of the United Nations. Any person with access to the
internet will be able to 'enconvert' text from any native language
of a member state into UNL. Just as easily, any UNL text can be
'deconverted' from UNL into native languages. United Nations
University's UNL Center will work with its partners to create and
promote the UNL software, which will be compatible with popular
network servers and computing platforms."
At the time, 120 researchers worldwide were working on a
multilingual project in 16 languages (Arabic, Brazilian, Chinese,
English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese,
Latvian, Mongolian, Russian, Spanish, Swahiki, Thai). After things
worked with 16 languages, other UN languages would be included in
2000.
UNL was meant to become the HTML of linguistic content. Possible
applications would be multilingual email, multilingual information,
active dictionaries for reading foreign languages online, and
machine translation for navigating the web and monitoring websites.
The project was also important from a political and cultural point
of view, as the first project building up tools for all languages
on the internet, i.e. main languages as well as minority languages.
The UNDL Foundation (UNDL: Universal Networking Digital Language)
was founded in January 2001 to develop and promote the UNL project,
and became a partner of the United Nations.
The definition of UNL has evolved over the years. According to the
UNDL Foundation’s website in 2010: “UNL is a computer language
that enables computers to process information and knowledge. It is
designed to replicate the functions of natural languages. Using
UNL, people can describe all information and knowledge conveyed by
natural languages for computers. As a result, computers can
intercommunicate through UNL and process information and knowledge
using UNL, thus providing people with a Linguistic Infrastructure
(LI) in computers and the internet for distributing, receiving and
understanding multilingual information. Such multilingual
information can be accessed by natural languages through the UNL
System. UNL, as a language for expressing information and
knowledge described in natural languages, has all the components
corresponding to that of a natural language.”