The Logos Wordtheque is a word-by-word multilingual library with a massive database (325,916,827 words as of December 10, 1998) containing multilingual novels, technical literature and translated texts.
Logos, an international translation company based in Modena, Italy, gives free access to the linguistic tools used by its translators: 200 translators at its headquarters and 2,500 translators on-line all over the world, who process around 200 texts per day. Apart from the Logos Wordtheque, the tools include the Logos Dictionary, a multilingual dictionary with 7,580,560 entry words (as of December 10, 1998); Linguistic Resources, a database of 553 glossaries; and the Universal Conjugator, a database for conjugation of verbs in 17 languages.
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 on-line 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 on-line book shop. Foreign translations are also available. If however no text containing the required word is found, the system acts as a search engine, sending the user to other websites concerning 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 suggestion, after which Logos translators and the company verify the translations forwarded."
Begun in 1997, Gallica is a massive undertaking by the Bibliothèque nationale de
France to digitize thousands of texts and images relating to French history,
life and culture. The first step of the program - the pictures and the texts of
French 19th century - is now available on the Web.
Many organizations have a digital library organized around a subject. For example, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit civil liberties organization working in the public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and access to public resources and information on-line, as well as to promote responsibility in new media, run the EFF Archives, with documents on civil liberties.
Are there only English texts on the Web? Not any longer - what was true at the beginning of the Internet, when it was a network created in the US before becoming worldwide, is not true any more. More and more digital libraries are offering texts in languages other than English.
Project Gutenberg is now developing its foreign collections, as announced in the
Project Gutenberg Newsletter of October 1997. In the Newsletter of March 1998,
Michael Hart, its founder and executive director, mentioned that Project
Gutenberg's volunteers were now working on Etexts in French, German, Portuguese
and Spanish, and he was also expecting to have some coming in the following
languages: Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian,
Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak,
Slovene, and Valencian (Catalan).