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Published in 2007, the ISO 639-3 standard provided three-letter codes for identifying 7,589 languages.
The first standard to identify languages was ISO 639-1, adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1988 as a set of two-letter language identifiers.
The ISO 639-2 standard followed in 1998 as a set of three-letter codes identifying 400 languages. The standard was a convergence of ISO 639-1 and the ANSI Z39.53 standard (ANSI: American National Standards Institute). The ANSI standard corresponded to the MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) language codes, a set of three- letter identifiers developed by the library community and adopted as an American National Standard in 1987.
Published by SIL International, the Ethnologue, an encyclopedic catalog of living languages, had also developed its own three- letter codes in its database since 1971, with the inclusion in the encyclopedia itself from the 10th edition (1984) onwards.
ISO 639-2 quickly became insufficient because of the small number of languages it could handle. In 2002, at the invitation of the International Organization for Standardization, SIL International prepared a new standard that reconciled the complete set of codes used in the Ethnologue with the codes already in use in ISO 639-2, as well as codes developed by the Linguist List — a main distribution list for linguists — to handle ancient and constructed languages.
Approved in 2006 and published in 2007, the ISO 639-3 standard provided three-letter codes for identifying 7,589 languages, with a list of languages as complete as possible, living and extinct, ancient and reconstructed, major and minor, and written and unwritten. SIL International was named the registration authority for the inventory of language identifiers, and administers the annual cycle for changes and updates.
2007 > GOOGLE TRANSLATE
[Summary] Launched by Google in October 2007, Google Translate is a free online language translation service that instantly translates a section of text, document or webpage into another language. Users paste texts in the web interface or supply an hyperlink. The automatic translations are produced by statistical analysis rather than traditional rule-based analysis. Prior to this date, Google used a Systran based translator like Babel Fish in Yahoo! As an automatic translation tool, Google Translate can help the reader understand the general content of a foreign language text, but doesn’t deliver accurate translations. In 2009, the text could be read by a speech program, with new languages added over the months. Released in June 2009, Google Translator Toolkit is a web service allowing (human) translators to edit the translations automatically generated by Google Translate. In January 2011, people could choose different translations for a word in Google Translate.
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