Building a multilingual electronic text collection of folk tales as a set of encapsulated document object: An approach for casual users to browse multilingual documents on the fly

Folk tales are an important heritage of every nation. Electronic text collections of folk tales are meaningful information resources for people who wish to learn about foreign cultures and their languages. This paper describes an electronic text collection of old folk tales which was developed using a multilingual document browsing system called the MHTML browser system, a gateway service to help clients access and display WWW documents written in foreign or multiple languages that the client browser cannot display by itself. The MHTML browser system converts a WWW document into a form which contains the source text and the minimum set of font glyphs required to display the text. The converted document object is sent to the client with a set of applets which display the document on the client browser. Since the glyphs are sent to the client from the MHTML gateway, the client does not need to have installed the fonts for the multilingual document, provided that the client is Java-enabled. The folk tale collection currently includes ten old Japanese folk tales. Each tale is written in English, French, and Japanese, and the user can show the three texts of a tale simultaneously on his/her WWW browser, e.g., Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Thus, a consumer user utilizing an off-the-shelf WWW browser can get a multilingual document on the fly without any additional procedures to set up his/her environment. In this paper, we first discuss the technological background of MHTML and the multilingual browser service for the digital library, as well as the issues involved in building the folk tale collection.