Lingotek, the leader in collaborative translation technology, today announced it has been commissioned by the Library of Congress to manage the project of translating nearly 1 million words from the Library of Congress and other World Digital Library (WDL) partners so they are available in seven target languages including English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish for the World Digital Library.

"The World Digital Library is an ambitious project designed to provide a multicultural digital storehouse of information and knowledge from cultures around the world," said Rob Vandenberg, president of Lingotek. "A fundamental aspect of this project is to translate and make available the massive amount of information so visitors can access the information in their own languages. We are working with the Library of Congress to take a primary step of translating huge amounts of metadata from libraries around the world into the target languages."

Lingotek's Collaborative Translation Platform brings together advanced technologies including machine translation, translation memories, and terminology management together in one interface to manage the translation of the content.

"The World Digital Library site will be launched on April 21 with historical treasures from partners around the world," said Michelle Rago, Technical Project Director, Library of Congress. "We have chosen Lingotek to manage the complex process of organizing the metadata records used to describe these treasures and to manage the team of professional translators to translate them initially into the seven target languages."

Each metadata record contains a paragraph that describes the historical significance of the item. The records also provide other bibliographic information including title, author, subjects, and a physical description. The records are uploaded to Lingotek where they are translated. Each record that is translated is added to the translation memories so when a record with similar content comes up, the professional translators can leverage the previous translation to help with the new one. Translations of common strings of words are used and reused, making the process very fast.

"By leveraging the tools in our translation platform, we are actually able to have the content translated faster than they can feed it to us," Vandenberg added. "Lingotek is also creating a new approach to social networks and social production to drive translation of content on a global scale. In the future, social production or the use of volunteers who speak languages outside the initial target languages may be leveraged to help with the translation process. The Lingotek Community Translation Platform is an ideal solution to serve as the core for this type of project."

About Lingotek
Lingotek is the leading provider of Collaborative Translation Technology. By harnessing the power of communities, products and services can now be distributed around the world in each market's localized language, while simultaneously increasing product loyalty among users. Lingotek's Collaborative Translation Platform brings machine translation, translation memories, terminology management together with a social network to enable the social production of localized content. Lingotek puts you, in business everywhere.