LOGOS SPEAKS THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD
La Gazzetta di Parma 05/04/2004

Key assets of the online translation portal www.logos.it are the multilingual dictionary, verb conjugator, a free automatic translation service and database of context containing key words. Millions of users the world over log on monthly to find words and verbs they need or want to translate into one of the 218 languages present in the portal database: in addition to the official European and Asian languages, you'll also find Basque, Urdu (Afghanistan, Pakistan), Latin, Sardinian and Italian dialects, including Parmigiano.

On the home page of the «Multilingual e-translation portal» you can click on any of the twenty national flags or type a word in the search box. All free-of charge services are listed on the left of the screen: there are 18 links to pages within the site or to related sites.

You can get to the dictionary from the home page or by typing www.logosdictionary.com The search bar reveals for example that the word "download" is télécharger in French, jaitsi in Basque and Ladda ner in Swedish.

There's also a section for children: they can click a flag for an alphabetical list of the most common words in their selected language. For most of the words there's also an audio track with mother tongue speakers pronouncing the word correctly.
A tool bar, namely the Logos Toolbar can be downloaded as a mini-automatic translator.The universal conjugator www.verba.org presents the full conjugation of verbs, from the present tense to the pluperfect, in each language in the database.

If web-surfers then want to find the literary context the word is used in, there's the Wordtheque link to the Logos library, to be found at www.wordtheque.com

We typed in "Christianity" and the site produced list upon list of extracts written by classic and contemporary authors and - just as impressive - is the bibliography.The word appears for instance in the "History of Italy" by the Renaissance writer Francesco Guicciardini, in the 1800 novel "I Vicere'" by Federico De Roberto and in modern pieces. You can repeat the search in any language to find matches in a total of 35,000 downloadable texts.
Some of the functions offered are also recreational, such as the Anagrams where «spot» gives tops, pots, post and stop. There' a limit though: it doesn't always work with words of more than four or five letters. Logos also offers an interactive glossary for information on medical, sports or economic jargon in a variety of languages. The glossary is interactive: it grows thanks to the input of its many professional users.Access to these services is also possible through www.logos.net making the architect of the portal: Modena-based Logos, one of the world's top ten companies in the field.

Set up in 1979 as a small commercial translation enterprise, Logos now has a staff of two hundred at its main headquarters and three thousand professional associates around the world.Its core business continues to be corporate translations, from technical manuals to multilingual answering machines for clients such as BMW Alcatel, Siemens Medical and Sony…

In this way, Logos manages to maintain its many no-profit services.The company signed an agreement in March with the Chilean government promoting an intercultural project to safeguard native languages such as Mapunzugun of the Mapuche people, Aymara and Rapanui, the language of Easter Island.

The driving force behind Logos' social commitment is its major shareholder, Chilean-born Rodrigo Vergara who came to Modena in 1973 as a political exile. "We are technological trailblazers, we were the first to believe in videotel and then in Internet", said Vergara. "The web was the main route to our success: it enabled us to share our huge dictionary and, commercially-speaking, to work in real time with clients worldwide who otherwise would have been difficult to reach.