[Overview]
Logos is a leading translation company located in Modena, Italy. In
1997, Logos had 200 in-house translators in Modena and 2,500 free-lance
translators worldwide, who processed around 200 texts per day. The
company made a bold move at the time, and decided to put on the web all
the linguistic tools used by its translators, for the internet
community to freely use them as well. The linguistic tools were the
Logos Dictionary, a multilingual dictionary with 7 billion words (in
Fall 1998); the Logos Wordtheque, a multilingual library with 300
billion words extracted from translated novels, technical manuals and
other texts; the Logos Linguistic Resources, a database of 500
glossaries; and the Logos Universal Conjugator, a database for verbs in
17 languages.
[In Depth (published in 1999)]
The Logos Dictionary is a multilingual dictionary with 7,580,560 words
(as of December 10, 1998). The Logos Wordtheque is a word-by-word
multilingual library with a massive database of 325,916,827 words
extracted from multilingual novels, technical literature and translated
texts. Logos Linguistic Resources is a database of 553 glossaries. The
Logos Universal Conjugator is a database for the conjugation of verbs
in 17 languages.
Logos is an international translation company based in Modena, Italy.
In 1997, Logos decided to put all the linguistic tools used by its
translators on the web for free. Logos had 200 translators on the spot
and 2,500 free-lance translators all over the world, who processed
around 200 texts per day.
When interviewed by Annie Kahn in the French daily newspaper Le Monde
of December 7, 1997, Rodrigo Vergara, the 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. The operation
has in fact attracted a great number of customers, but also allowed us
to widen our network of translators, thanks to the contacts made in the
wake of the initiative."
In the same article, Annie Kahn wrote: "The Logos site is much more
than a mere dictionary or a collection of links to other online
dictionaries. A system cornerstone is the document search software,
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
button to access the whole text or even to order the book, thanks to a
partnership agreement with Amazon.com, the famous online bookstore.
Foreign translations are also available. However, if no text containing
the required word is found, the system acts as a search engine, sending
the user to other websites mentioning the term in question. 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 their own suggestions, after which Logos
translators and the company check the forwarded translations."