In December 1997, Logos, a global translation company, decided to put on the web all the professional tools used by its translators, for the internet community to freely use them as well.
Logos was founded by Rodrigo Vergara in 1979, with headquarters in Modena, Italy. In 1997, Logos had 300 in-house translators and 2,500 free-lance translators worldwide, who processed around 200 texts per day.
The linguistic tools available online were the Logos Dictionary, a multilingual dictionary with 7.5 billion words (in fall 1998); the Logos Wordtheque, a multilingual library with 328 billion words extracted from translated novels, technical manuals, and other texts, that could be searched by language, word, author or title; 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 in an article of the French daily Le Monde dated 7 December 1997, 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, called “Les mots pour le dire” (The words to tell it), 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 document 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 pronunciation. 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."