LOGOS: Ten million words in 113 languages every month
Terra 15/11/2000

Modena (Italia)


Modena is not only the city of Ferraris, the tenor Luciano Pavarotti, tortellini, balsamic vinegar and Lambrusco, it is also the location of the head office of the LOGOS Group, one of the most important firms in the world for multilingual Internet information (number 1 in Europe). 3000 people throughout the world work at home on a unique language and cultural project using the most modern technology.

The immediate and everyday, but admittedly very lucrative objective of the firm is the translation of enormous quantities of text, for the most part manuals with instructions for the use of products such as hand-helds, computers, household electrical goods etc.

LOGOS was set up in 1979 as a translation agency for local small businesses; today LOGOS specialises in multilingual services for portal and web pages and also for e-commerce platforms. The group’s most important clients are Philips, Texas Instruments, Daimler Chrysler, Hoechst, Ericsson, Nokia and Barilla. Logo’s turnover was 30 million Euro in the year 2002.

In 1995 the President of LOGOS, the Chilean exile Rodrigo Vergara, who came to Italy about 30 years ago when fleeing from the Pinochet dictatorship, had the brilliant idea of creating the on-line "Living Dictionary", which today comprises 8 million words in 176 languages. According to Vergara’s philosophy, the traditional profession of translator should not change substantially, merely in terms of the use of new tools. At LOGOS they reject the idea that automatic machine translation can become established in the future. This is because human beings have a fundamental pre-eminence, namely the capacity to be able to express and understand all sfumature (nuances), which can only be recognised by human intuition.

Machines can only help them insofar as they re-use the results of earlier work and thus reduce the time needed to complete a translation. In other words, the translator will no longer translate 100% of a new text from scratch, but only the previously untranslated sentences which are not contained in the Logosys memory, the brain of LOGOS.

The translators have, via the Internet, access to an extremely rich source of data, which they can download to their PC, for the most part free of charge. This rich source consists of the "Living Dictionary", the universal conjugator "Verba" and the "Wordtheque", one of the richest multilingual libraries on the Internet (17,000 texts in 113 languages).

This enormous digital archive, which is structured in the style of communicating tubes through which it is possible to get from the words to the texts and contexts, and then to return to the words, is accessible to everyone via the portal page www.logos.it.

"Living Dictionary" and "Verba" are open to contributions from outside, which are published on-line after they have been checked by the linguists at LOGOS. This system has made it possible to store in the archive idioms which are spoken by a few hundred or thousand people, such as Breton, Frisian, Sardinian (sardo campidanese; sardo logudorese) or even Fijian.

"Wordtheque" is an electronic editor, which offers the free on-line publication of new texts, especially those written in minor languages. The books can be downloaded for a fee; the royalties go exclusively to the author and the translator.

Finally, we should like to refer to two on-line initiatives by the LOGOS Group in the field of tourist information: www.agriturismoinitalia.com (the same address for German as well) describes the national parks, gastronomic specialities and typical festivals in the 20 Italian regions, using words, photographs and maps.

The web pages also contain an index with photographs and a brief description of thousands of offers for "holidays in the country" from South Tyrol to Sicily; www.giardinigiardini.com contains journalistic services on barely-known botanical gardens in Italy which are open to the public.