More recently still, Logos Group has acquired a majority shareholding in the leading UK translation company Praetorius Limited, which in turn controls the US company Praetorius North America Inc. This move will considerably strengthen Logos' presence in British and American markets.

This development marks a further stage in the international expansion strategy of the Logos Group.

And as we can see, Logos has also strengthened its position in the translation tools arena with a majority stake in the company responsible for developing Wordfast. This acquisition complements the Group's existing proprietary computer-aided translation tool (Mneme) which is for Logos network use only. Mneme is in fact a web-based translation memory database, which is fully integrated in the Logos production process and in its proprietary workflow and content management system (Logosys).

For Rodrigo Vergara, the move into the publishing sector is all about owning content. "With magazine publishing, we have an opportunity to localize what is essentially consumer content for the global marketplace, so there is a clear synergy between translation and publishing. But what's important is that, at the end of the day, we own the content. So ours is not so much a diversification policy as a content and information distribution policy."

But didn't Rodrigo, who is developing his famous Logos Dictionary (http://www.logos.it/dictionary) through user contributions on his website, once say that 'words are free'?

Today, he distinguishes between words—which are still free—and content publishing, which is what generates revenues. The content acquired through the publishing ventures, and indeed from all the Group's activities, ultimately ends up as usable words, which can be tagged for sector and usage, and eventually made available to the translation division as a linguistic resource. For him "writing, editing, publishing and other forms of intellectual work are similar to the translation process. So we are not moving into another sector. In the end, publishing is simply part of our general multilingual content management business."

Logos also prides itself on a self-developed localization workflow and resource strategy built within its Logosys environment. How does this in-house development integrate into a technology strategy which now includes the development of a tool such as Wordfast?

For Rodrigo, "since everyone is using our content in various forms, we shall soon be moving towards a Linux-based open platform on the website. At the same time, we are integrating Wordfast into our entire translation technology system. In our vision, thousands of our translators will use Wordfast at home as their preferred interface with us or with other translation agencies. Wordfast is so easy to use that our translators can access our system via Wordfast. Or they can use their own local system that integrates perfectly with Wordfast."

By supporting the development of Wordfast and owning the code, Logos is clearly wagering on the possibility that the memory engine will become a de facto standard for working translators, just as it hopes that its evolving online Dictionary (4.5 millions hits per month, 11 thousand professional users) will become a word resource as universal as the machine-driven Translate button on certain web search engines. "We need a 'proprietary' tool as it were, so that we can rapidly make any modifications to the code to meet different customer needs."

As part of this total integration process, Wordfast will soon include a functionality that will enable users to click straight into the Logos Dictionary, Verba (conjugator) and Wordtheque (searchable text corpus) resources. And further products are apparently in the pipeline. "We believe that by providing a free tool such as Wordfast, we are helping the industry as a whole by providing useful tools for translators and promoting good technology. "

How will Logos' Wordfast strategy benefit customers? "The plan is to keep on developing customer-specific translation memory databases, with a special interface for customers," as Wordfast's creator, Yves Champollion, mentions. In this way Logos will provide a service for managing a customer's translation memories, which will enable the customer to use the memories as a translation tool, either working with Logos or with other translators. And Logos will try to generate revenue by customizing various parameters of Wordfast to meet specific client needs. "Whatever our ultimate marketing strategy," says Vergara, "we shall make Wordfast free for the developing world. At year's end we shall decide on the best way forward – possibly financing it with advertising, among other options."

Rodrigo Vergara's approach rules out strategic alliances as a way of sharing risk. "We don't have the capacity for alliances of the Microsoft-Oracle type, so we shall have to make do with the available technology rather than co-develop something new. What we can do is make our own best practice in technology integration available to others. But we will not be seeking to do development either with other leading players or our own competitors."

What does seem to excite Logos' CEO is the fact that his Wordfast strategy can serve the interests of more people than professional translators. And in this sense it serves Rodrigo's explicit dedication to maintaining the world's cultural and linguistic diversity—which is, to say the least, unusual in the industry. "We all live in a multilingual environment," he says, "and there are plenty of professional people out there who need to translate or operate in more than one language as part of their daily work, be they software developers or doctors or whatever. Wordfast is extremely easy to use and by making it available for free on our website, anyone anywhere in the world can start using it. It takes its place alongside our conjugator and our dictionary as a language tool designed for anyone who needs to communicate across languages."

This Logos concept of blue-printing future multilingual needs into today's services can be seen in other moves. One of the reasons for the development of the Children' Dictionary, the first multilingual dictionary for children accessible free of charge from the company's own portal at http://www.logos.it.

The Children's Dictionary (http://www.logos.it/bimbi) is compiled in more than 100 languages, including English, the main European languages, Albanian, Romanian, Arabic, Serbian, Chinese and Japanese, as well as a number of Italian dialects (spoken in Lombardy, the Veneto and Friuli regions, Sardinia, etc.) and Latin. Besides translating a word, the dictionary also illustrates its use, lists the various definitions and gives a clear pronunciation.

This move was almost certainly to address the children's 'market', not only because Logos' existing linguistic tools could be useful for school children, but also because—rather as computer game culture creates a behavioral paradigm today—today's school kids will be tomorrow's workforce. They will all need tools for communicating and operating effectively in a multilingual world. "The way we manage our own information as a localization company," says Rodrigo, "is in many ways a model of how everybody will have to manage it in future. We may spend 99.9% on managing information since we are knowledge workers, but even a mechanical engineering company spends 90% of its time on information. So we believe that Logos' practice in this area can become a model for SMEs and others in the years ahead."

Rodrigo Vergara is CEO of Logos. You can reach him at market@logos.it.