Viewing multilingual documents on your local web browser

Abstract

A new technology called MHTML has been developed to allow users to browse multilingual documents on an off-the-shelf Web browser. The technology can be applied to a multilingual gateway service to browse foreign documents and to a multilingual electronic text collection of Japanese folk tales. The MHTML technology is composed of three elements: the MHTML document object; the MHTML viewer; and the MHTML service. The four major advantage of the MHTML technology begins with its simpler user environment where the user install only a Java-enabled browser. Secondly, the number of distinct character used in a source text is much smaller than the total number of characters of the text. Third, a rich set of languages can be viewed on a client using a set of MHTML servers distributed on the Internet. And finally, the MHTML is useful for browsing texts that include uncommon characters.