A huge virtual web-based archive: PRESERVING WORLD LANGUAGES
L'Unità, Italia 28/12/2003

The majority of the 6000 languages currently spoken are at risk of extinction.

Some of the languages are completely unheard of, strange dialects spoken only by a few hundred people. Some are endangered "species" to be safeguarded to ensure they don’t disappear altogether. The Logos Group, established in Modena in 1979, has set itself this and other goals. In this respect, Hilda Yanet Teao Beri-beri has recently arrived in Modena from Easter Island to try to save Rapanui, a language spoken by just 3000 people.

A native of the Island now working in Santiago, Chile, she has travelled across the world to take up position in front of a computer and start translating into her native language a series of words and phrases that are incomprehensible for practically the entire planet. The translations will then be uploaded to the Logos website and preserved for posterity.

One of the top ten companies in the world for multilingual translations and closely intrinsically associated with the Internet, the Logos Group started out as a small commercial translation enterprise and has grown into a global player with partners around the world. Its simple but ingenious infrastructure is based on a Web-based and continuous exchange of information, data and messages. This is thanks both to Logosys, our pioneering Web-based central workflow management platform and the associated, organised coordination of all processes and words stored in a consolidated "translation memory": a huge virtual archive created, and continually updated, throughout its 20-year history. The fulcrum and lifeblood of the global organisation is the integrated and multicultural network of human resources based on the constant support of some three thousand mother tongue translators working from their native countries and another three hundred or so computer engineers, project managers, translators and graphic artists working from the main office in Modena. The Logos Group achieved global acclaim also thanks to the free-of-charge online services which have been available at www.logos.net for over three years now: the Living Dictionary (the world's largest interactive, multilingual dictionary); Wordtheque (the largest online library); Verba Volant, a Universal Verb Conjugator, a Translation Course, an online Journalism Course as well as the new Dictionary and Multilingual Children's Library which also features audio tracks to help the learning process.

Although the global marketplace may be the answer to economic development, rich and poor countries alike, it is expanding to the detriment of ethnic minorities. Professor Steve Levinson, of the Psycholinguistics Institute in Nijmegen (the Netherlands) stated during an interview granted to the British daily "The Independent", that by the end of this century most of the more than six thousand languages spoken in the world will be extinct. The most commonly spoken languages will be English, Spanish and Chinese.


Claude Hagège, author of Halte à la mort des langues, writes, "We are actually witnessing a sort of struggle for life between our ancestral languages and the language that allows us to survive financially. The abandonment of a language is always the result of a confrontation between a dominant and less dominant language - a Neo-Darwinian type of natural selection. If we accept this potent metaphor, it is because even languages are living species." In Papua New Guinea, where the richest linguistic diversity in the world is to be found, young people no longer speak the local idiom, but express themselves in a very basic form of English. Logos, whose Living Dictionary numbers more than 200 languages, has strongly committed itself culturally to languages in danger of extinction, by allocating the same amount of space to each language irrespective of the number of people who speak it or of the political/economic weight of the country in which it is spoken.


The Modena-based company is headed by Rodrigo Vergara, a Chilean national who fled to Italy after the 1973 coup where he was received with "true friendship and affection", as he likes to remind people. His original idea has now taken on gigantic proportions thanks to the technologies that have emerged over the past twenty years. “If we look on the construction of a multilingual dictionary from an organisational point of view, and we consider the Internet the nervous system of humanity, all obstacles disappear since we can all enter it, use it and add words to it. By expanding and improving a living dictionary that is universal and free of charge, we are building a work tool and a resource as part of the struggle to maintain cultural diversity." Of these languages, four thousand are considered "native" and about half are already disappearing whilst many others have already lost contact with the natural world.


In addition to the translation of any language pair, working to and from all languages worldwide, Logos provides professional desktop publishing services, localisation of software applications/platforms, websites (including e-business platforms). Our public portal has been the genesis for private portals customised for clients to create and maintain securely their own specific multilingual glossaries, which can then be consulted and updated online. This is in addition to virtual accessibility across the entire organisation to clients’ libraries of context and translation memory in all available languages online. Thanks to the Logos approach: continuous and incremental updates can be managed highly effectively – all promoting a seamless and transparent exchange of data between client and service provider and working towards consistency and excellence in communication.

The online Public Dictionary is very similar to a living organism, containing millions of words translated into 218 languages. It is the largest of its kind in the world and is freely accessible at www.logosdictionary.com. Every day more than 4,500 professional volunteers access the dictionary over the Internet to add new terms and definitions, freely contributing to the diffusion and conservation of their own language.

www.logos.net
www.logosdictionary.com

The culture of many peoples are disappearing with them

Linguists consider that a language is in danger of extinction when more than 30% of the children in a language community cease to learn it. There are currently less than one hundred thousand native speakers of 90% of the world's languages. About 250 are used by more than a million people. According to estimates gathered from an authoritative study of areas in North America and Australia populated by native Indians/Aborigines, experts claim that 90% of these languages will be irretrievably lost within a few generations. The problem of endangered languages touches on not just small ethnic minorities. According to a study supported by the European Commission at the beginning of the 1990s, half of the 46 minority languages in Europe were then already at risk. The Pacific region, from Japan to Australia and Papua New Guinea, is the home of a third of all the languages in the world. In Taiwan, 14 of its 23 languages are disappearing; in New Caledonia, French is threatening the existence of the indigenous language with the result that 40,000 of the 60,000-strong population have forgotten their mother tongue. In Africa, the governments encourage the language of mass use like Swahili and the colonial languages. In North America, the Inuit languages are at risk. All populations, explain UN experts, are entitled to preserve their own ways of life; these populations are the custodians of precious stores of knowledge that are handed down orally from generation to generation. The loss of their languages equates to the disappearance of entire encyclopaedias.


The demise of indigenous cultures also causes the loss of new medical resources given that these cultures know of and use medicinal plants unknown to the rest of the world. This knowledge is often concealed within religious ceremonies and rites. The Aka pygmies of the Central African Republic mix medicinal herbs with black magic, rituals and ceremonies, demonstrating how languages, religions and beliefs can never be separated from the indigenous interpretation of nature.

Geographical location of spoken languages:

32% in Asia
30% in Africa
19% in the Pacific Ocean Islands
15% in the Americas
3% in Europe

Countries with the most languages:

Papua New Guinea 847 languages
Indonesia 655
Nigeria 376
India 309
Australia 261
Mexico 230
Cameroon 201
Brazil 185
Ex Zaire 158
The Philippines 153



Most endangered languages:

2,034 languages have already disappeared
1,000 are spoken by 100 to 1,000 people
553 are spoken by less than 100 people
Udihe, a Siberian language, is spoken by about 100 people; Arikapu is spoken by six Indians in the Amazon jungle;
Eyak, idiom of an Inuit population in Alaska, is spoken by only one person.