Logos is an international translation company with headquarters in Modena, Italy. In 1997, Logos had 200 in-house translators in Modena and 2,500 free-lance translators worldwide, who processed around 200 texts per day. The company made a bold move, and decided to put on the web all the linguistic tools used by its translators, for the internet community to freely use them as well. The linguistic tools were the Logos Dictionary, a multilingual dictionary with 7 billion words (in fall 1998); the Logos Wordtheque, a multilingual library with 300 billion words extracted from translated novels, technical manuals and other texts; the Logos Linguistic Resources, a database of 500 glossaries; and the Logos Universal Conjugator, a database for verbs in 17 languages.
When interviewed by Annie Kahn on December 7, 1997 for the French daily Le Monde, Rodrigo Vergara, 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. This move has in fact attracted many customers, and also allowed us to widen our network of translators, thanks to 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 online dictionaries. The cornerstone is the doc.u.ment search program, 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 to access the whole text or even to order the book, including in foreign translations, thanks to a partnership agreement with the famous online bookstore Amazon.com. However, if no text containing the required word is found, the program acts as a search engine, sending the user to other web sources containing this word. In the case of certain words, you can even hear the p.r.o.nunciation.
If there is no translation currently available, the system calls on the public to contribute. Everyone can make suggestions, after which Logos translators check the suggested translations they receive."
Robert Beard, a language teacher at Bucknell University (in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania), founded the website "A Web of Online Dictionaries" (WOD) in 1995, and included it then in a larger project, yourDictionary.com, that he cofounded in early 2000.
He wrote in January 2000: "The new website is an index of 1,200+ dictionaries in more than 200 languages. Besides the WOD, the new website includes a word-of-the-day-feature, word games, a language chat room, the old "Web of Online Grammars"
(now expanded to include additional language resources), the "Web of Linguistic Fun", multilingual dictionaries; specialized English dictionaries; thesauri and other vocabulary aids; language identifiers and guessers, and other features; dictionary indices. yourDictionary.com will hopefully be the premiere language portal and the largest language resource site on the web. It is now actively acquiring dictionaries and grammars of all languages with a particular focus on endangered languages. It is overseen by a blue ribbon panel of linguistic experts from all over the world."
yourDictionary.com wants to be the premiere portal for all languages without any exception, and as such offers a specific section called Endangered Language Repository. Robert Beard explained in the same email interview: "Languages that are endangered are primarily languages without writing systems at all (only 1/3 of the world"s 6,000+ languages have writing systems). I still do not see the web contributing to the loss of language ident.i.ty and still suspect it may, in the long run, contribute to strengthening it. More and more Native Americans, for example, are contacting linguists, asking them to write grammars of their language and help them put up dictionaries.
For these people, the web is an affordable boon for cultural expression."
The 6,700 languages of our planet are catalogued in "The Ethnologue: Languages of the World", an encyclopedia published by SIL International (SIL: Summer Inst.i.tute of Linguistics).
Barbara Grimes was the editor of the 8th to 14th editions, 1971-2000. She wrote in January 2000: "The Ethnologue is a catalog of the languages of the world, with information about where they are spoken, an estimate of the number of speakers, what language family they are in, alternate names, names of dialects, other socio-linguistic and demographic information, dates of published Bibles, a name index, a language family index, and language maps." The Ethnologue is freely available on the web. The print version and CD-ROM can be bought online.
= Minority languages
Caoimhin o Donnaile teaches computing - through the Gaelic language - at the Inst.i.tute Sabhal Mor Ostaig, located on the Island of Skye, in Scotland. He also maintains the bilingual (English, Gaelic) college website, which is the main site worldwide with information on Scottish Gaelic, as well as the webpage European Minority Languages, a list of minority languages by alphabetic order and by language family. He wrote in May 2001: "There has been a great expansion in the use of information technology in our college. Far more computers, more computing staff, flat screens. Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic spell-checking, and a Gaelic online terminology database. There are more hits on our website. There is more use of sound. Gaelic radio (both Scottish and Irish) is now available continuously worldwide via the internet. A major project has been the translation of the Opera web browser into Gaelic - the first software of this size available in Gaelic."
What about the internet and endangered languages? "I would emphasize the point that as regards the future of endangered languages, the internet speeds everything up. If people don"t care about preserving languages, the internet and accompanying globalisation will greatly speed their demise. If people do care about preserving them, the internet will be a tremendous help."
Guy Antoine is the founder of Windows on Haiti, a reference website about Haitian culture. He wrote in November 1999: "In Windows on Haiti, the primary language of the site is English, but one will equally find a center of lively discussion conducted in "Kreyl". In addition, one will find doc.u.ments related to Haiti in French, in the old colonial Creole, and I am open to publishing others in Spanish and other languages. I do not offer any sort of translation, but multilingualism is alive and well at the site, and I predict that this will increasingly become the norm throughout the web."
Guy added in June 2001: "Kreyl is the only national language of Haiti, and one of its two official languages, the other being French. It is hardly a minority language in the Caribbean context, since it is spoken by eight to ten million people.
(...) I have taken the promotion of Kreyl as a personal cause, since that language is the strongest of bonds uniting all Haitians, in spite of a small but disproportionately influential Haitian elite"s disdainful att.i.tude to adopting standards for the writing of Kreyl and supporting the publication of books and official communications in that language. For instance, there was recently a two-week book event in Haiti"s Capital and it was promoted as "Livres en folie" ("A mad feast for books"). Some 500 books from Haitian authors were on display, among which one could find perhaps 20 written in Kreyl. This is within the context of France"s major push to celebrate Francophony among its former colonies. This plays rather well in Haiti, but directly at the expense of Creolophony. What I have created in response to those att.i.tudes are two discussion forums on my website, Windows on Haiti, held exclusively in Kreyl. One is for general discussions on just about everything but obviously more focused on Haiti"s current socio-political problems. The other is reserved only to debates of writing standards for Kreyl. Those debates have been quite spirited and have met with the partic.i.p.ation of a number of linguistic experts. The uniqueness of these forums is their non-academic nature."
= Translations
Henk Slettenhaar is a professor in communication technologies at Webster University, Geneva, Switzerland. He has regularly insisted on the need of bilingual websites, in the original language and in English. He wrote in December 1998: "I see multilingualism as a very important issue. Local communities that are on the web should princ.i.p.ally use the local language for their information. If they want to present it to the world community as well, it should be in English too. I see a real need for bilingual websites. I am delighted there are so many offerings in the original language now. I much prefer to read the original with difficulty than getting a bad translation."
Henk added in August 1999: "There are two main categories of websites in my opinion. The first one is the global outreach for business and information. Here the language is definitely English first, with local versions where appropriate. The second one is local information of all kinds in the most remote places. If the information is meant for people of an ethnic and/or language group, it should be in that language first, with perhaps a summary in English. We have seen lately how important these local websites are - in Kosovo and Turkey, to mention just the most recent ones. People were able to get information about their relatives through these sites."
Jean-Pierre Cloutier was the editor of "Chroniques de Cyberie", a weekly French-language online report of internet news. Jean- Pierre wrote in August 1999: "The web is going to grow in non- English-speaking regions. So we have to take into account the technical aspects of the medium if we want to reach these "new"
users. I think it is a pity there are so few translations of important doc.u.ments and essays published on the web - from English into other languages and vice versa. (...) In the same way, the recent spreading of the internet in new regions raises questions which would be good to read about. When will Spanish- speaking communication theorists and those speaking other languages be translated?"
Marcel Grangier is the head of the French Section of the Swiss Federal Government"s Central Linguistic Services, which means he is in charge of organizing translations into French for the Swiss government. He wrote in January 1999: "We can see multilingualism on the internet as a happy and irreversible inevitability. So we have to laugh at the doomsayers who only complain about the supremacy of English. Such supremacy is not wrong in itself, because it is mainly based on statistics (more PCs per inhabitant, more people speaking English, etc.). The answer is not to "fight" English, much less whine about it, but to build more sites in other languages. As a translation service, we also recommend that websites be multilingual. The increasing number of languages on the internet is inevitable and can only boost multicultural exchanges. For this to happen in the best possible circ.u.mstances, we still need to develop tools to improve compatibility. Fully coping with accents and other characters is only one example of what can be done."
2001: COPYRIGHT, COPYLEFT AND CREATIVE COMMONS
= [Overview]
Creative Commons (CC) was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessing, a professor at Stanford Law School, California. As explained on its website, "Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof." There were one million Creative Commons licensed works in 2003, 4.7 million licensed works in 2004, 20 million licensed works in 2005, 50 million licensed works in 2006, 90 million licensed works in 2007, and 130 million licensed works in 2008. Science Commons was founded in 2005 to "design strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web- enabled scientific research." ccLearn was founded in 2007 as "a division of Creative Commons dedicated to realizing the full potential of the internet to support open learning and open educational resources."
= Copyright on the web
What did people think about copyright on the web, when there were heated debated about print articles and other copyrighted works being posted and re-posted without the consent of their authors? Here are some answers.
Based in San Francisco, California, Jacques Gauchey was a journalist in information technology and a "facilitator"
between the United States and Europe. He wrote in July 1999: "Copyright in its traditional context doesn"t exist any more.
Authors have to get used to a new situation: the total freedom of the flow of information. The original content is like a fingerprint: it can"t be copied. So it will survive and flourish."
Guy Antoine is the founder of Windows on Haiti, a reference website about Haitian culture. He wrote in November 1999: "The debate will continue forever, as information becomes more conspicuous than the air that we breathe and more fluid than water. (...) Authors will have to become a lot more creative in terms of how to control the dissemination of their work and profit from it. The best that we can do right now is to promote basic standards of professionalism, and insist at the very least that the source and authorship of any work be duly acknowledged. Technology will have to evolve to support the authorization process."
Alain Bron is a consultant in information systems and a novelist. He wrote in November 1999: "I regard the web today as a public domain. That means in practice the notion of copyright on it disappears: everyone can copy everyone else. Anything original risks being copied at once if copyrights are not formally registered or if works are available without payment facilities. A solution is to make people pay for information, but this is no watertight guarantee against it being copied."
Peter Raggett was the deputy-head (and now the head) of the OECD Central Library (OECD: Organization for Economic and Cooperation Development). He wrote in August 1999: "The copyright question is still very unclear. Publishers naturally want their fees for each article ordered and librarians and end-users want to be able to download immediately the full text of articles. At the moment, each publisher seems to have its own policy for access to electronic versions and they would benefit from having some kind of h.o.m.ogenous policy, preferably allowing unlimited downloading of their electronic material."
Tim McKenna is an author who thinks and writes about the complexity of truth in a world of flux. He wrote in October 2000: "Copyright is a difficult issue. The owner of the intellectual property thinks that s/he owns what s/he has created. I believe that the consumer purchases the piece of plastic (in the case of a CD) or the bounded pages (in the case of book). The business community has not found a new way to add value to intellectual property. Consumers don"t think very abstractly. When they download songs for example, they are simply listening to them, they are not possessing them. The music and publishing industry need to find ways to give consumers tactile vehicles for selling the intellectual property."
= Copyright and WIPO
Since the web became mainstream, the posting by the thousands of electronic texts and other doc.u.ments has been an headache for organizations in charge of applying the rules relating to intellectual property.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is an intergovernmental organization, and one of the 16 specialized agencies of the United Nations. It is responsible for protecting intellectual property throughout the world through cooperation among countries. It is also responsible for implementing various multilateral treaties dealing with the legal and administrative aspects of intellectual property.
Intellectual property comprises industrial property and copyright. Industrial property relates to inventions, trademarks, industrial designs and appellations of origin.
Copyright relates to literary, musical, artistic, photographic and audiovisual works. WIPO stated on its website in 1999: "As regards the number of literary and artistic works created worldwide, it is difficult to make a precise estimate. However, the information available indicates that at present around 1,000,000 books/t.i.tles are published and some 5,000 feature films are produced in a year, and the number of copies of phonograms sold per year presently is more than 3,000 million."
Copyright protection means that using a copyrighted work is lawful only if we get authorization from the copyright owner.
As explained by WIPO on its website in the section "International Protection of Copyright and Neighbouring Rights", the authorizations granted by the copyright owner can be: "The right to copy or otherwise reproduce any kind of work; the right to distribute copies to the public; the right to rent copies of at least certain categories of works (such as computer programs and audiovisual works); the right to make sound recordings of the performances of literary and musical works; the right to perform in public, particularly musical, dramatic or audiovisual works; the right to communicate to the public by cable or otherwise the performances of such works and, particularly, to broadcast, by radio, television or other wireless means, any kind of work; the right to translate literary works; the right to rent, particularly, audiovisual works, works embodied in phonograms and computer programs; the right to adapt any kind of work and particularly the right to make audiovisual works thereof."
Under some national laws, some of these rights - which together are referred to as "economic rights" - are not exclusive rights of authorization but, in some specific cases, merely rights to remuneration. In addition to economic rights, authors - whether or not they own the economic rights - enjoy "moral rights" on the basis of which authors have the right to claim their authorship and require that their names be indicated on the copies of the work and in connection with other uses, and they have the right to oppose the mutilation or deformation of their works.
= Shrinking of public domain
Michael Hart created Project Gutenberg in July 1971 to make electronic versions of literary works and disseminate them for free. In 2009, Project Gutenberg has had tens of thousands of downloads every day. As recalled by Michael in January 2009, "I knew [in July 1971] that the future of computing, and the internet, was going to be... "The Information Age." That was also the day I said we would be able to carry quite literally the entire Library of Congress in one hand and the system would certainly make it illegal... too much power to leave in the hands of the ma.s.ses."
As defined by Project Gutenberg, "public domain is the set of cultural works that are free of copyright, and belong to everyone equally", i.e. for books, the ones that can be digitized and released on the internet for free. But the task of Project Gutenberg hasn"t be made any easier by the increasing restrictions to public domain. In former times, 50% of works belonged to public domain, and could be freely used by everybody. A much tougher legislation was set in place over the centuries, step by step, especially during the 20th century, despite our so-called "information society". In 2100, 99% of works might be governed by copyright, with a meager 1% for public domain.
In the "Copyright HowTo" section of its website, Project Gutenberg explains how to confirm the public domain status of books according to U.S. copyright laws. Here is a summary: (a) Works published before 1923 entered the public domain no later than 75 years from the copyright date: all these works belong to public domain; (b) Works published between 1923 and 1977 retain copyright for 95 years: no such works will enter the public domain until 2019; (c) Works created from 1978 on enter the public domain 70 years after the death of the author if the author is a natural person: nothing will enter the public domain until 2049; (d) Works created from 1978 on enter the public domain 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation if the author is a corporate one: nothing will enter the public domain until 2074.
Each copyright legislation is more restrictive than the previous one. A major blow for digital libraries was the amendment to the 1976 Copyright Act signed on October 27, 1998.
As explained by Michael Hart in July 1999: "Nothing will expire for another 20 years. We used to have to wait 75 years. Now it is 95 years. And it was 28 years (+ a possible 28-year extension, only on request) before that, and 14 years (+ a possible 14-year extension) before that. So, as you can see, this is a serious degrading of the public domain, as a matter of continuing policy."
John Mark Ockerbloom, founder of The Online Books Page in 1993, got also deeply concerned by the 1998 amendment. He wrote in August 1999: "I think it is important for people on the web to understand that copyright is a social contract that is designed for the public good - where the public includes both authors and readers. This means that authors should have the right to exclusive use of their creative works for limited times, as is expressed in current copyright law. But it also means that their readers have the right to copy and reuse the work at will once copyright expires. In the U.S. now, there are various efforts to take rights away from readers, by restricting fair use, lengthening copyright terms (even with some proposals to make them perpetual) and extending intellectual property to cover facts separate from creative works (such as found in the "database copyright" proposals). There are even proposals to effectively replace copyright law altogether with potentially much more onerous contract law. (...) Stakeholders in this debate have to face reality, and recognize that both producers and consumers of works have legitimate interests in their use.
If intellectual property is then negotiated by a balance of principles, rather than as the power play it is too often ends up being ("big money vs. rogue pirates"), we may be able to come up with some reasonable accommodations."
Michael Hart wrote in July 1999: "No one has said more against copyright extensions than I have, but Hollywood and the big publishers have seen to it that our Congress won"t even mention it in public. The kind of copyright debate going on is totally impractical. It is run by and for the "Landed Gentry of the Information Age." "Information Age"? For whom?"