Multilingual Access and Services for Digital Collections

Book excerpt: This unique guide offers you a thorough understanding of multilingual information access (MLIA) and services and related concepts, such as database design, information retrieval, machine translation, and natural language processing. Written for digital library developers, library and information science graduate students, and information professionals serving international information users, this book defines multilingual information access (MLIA) and discusses the importance of enabling international users to access digital collections. Based on a systematic review of the research and development carried out on cross-language information retrieval, machine translation, and case studies of current multilingual digital libraries, the author clearly explains what you need to know about technologies for building MLIA function for digital collections. The book leads you through an examination of Internet language services and tools that are useful for developing multilingual digital libraries and for assisting international users in accessing digital resources. Content is further clarified by two research projects that are presented to demonstrate the application of technologies used to build MLIA functions and multilingual user interfaces. The book concludes with possible strategies for using Internet language services and tools to implement MLIA function for digital collections.