In Mozart's Words: Working with a Correspondence Database
Paolo Rebulla · Fontes artis musicae · 2011
The full potential of the web cannot be entirely explited, in part because of linguistic barriers and in part because of the difficulty in grasping the semantic value of a textual reference. According to the UNESCO, 80% of web content is in English; therefore many users cannot properly understand the content, and any search submitted to search engines in any other language gets poor results. We hope to overcome these barriers by proposing a multilingual text of the letters of one of the most important and prolific artists, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The letters are published in their original version (German), and translated, for now, into English, French and Italian. As for the semantic issue, the website offers a univocal index to names, places and works mentioned within the correspondence, no matter what the language of surfing. The database is manually built, a further important consideration when it comes to the high costs of jindexing large bodies of text.