First The legal Stuff

These pages protected by copyright ©, 1996 thru 2022 by Bigben. You can use these pages for any educational or non-profit purpose and they are provided "as is" without expressed or implied warranty. Many links lead to commercial sites that are attempting to sell products or services. Purchase of any products or services from these companies is the responsibility of the user. Please do not copy outright, any of the sites listed. The developers of these websites have devoted much effort to building up the resources they are providing and the thieft of thier efforts is not only rude but illegal when material has a copyright.

Word2Word Language Resources began as bookmarks for Bennett (Bigben) Blaustein in the fall of 1995. The language resources started after Bigben saw several teenagers arguing with a new user in a chat system that had been located at rivendel.com. The new user did not know how to speak English and the teenagers insisted that English was the only language to be spoken on the internet. Bigben had to explain to these kids why anyone was allowed to use any language on the internet and that foreign languages were exceptable to use on the chat system he was in charge of. Bigben started to collect language resources to assist people visiting the chat systems and the links were made public in December of 1995. The resources links had resided at the rivendel.com site until its closure in January 2001. Bigben moved the resources to his personal domain of word2word.com with the hope of providing assistance so that people can communicate between the language barriers and to help people foster a better understanding of the diverse peoples and cultures of planet earth.

What that Means

We encourage the users to link to our pages and to make links to the individual pages we maintain links to; however, we do not wish to see wholesale plagerism of our site. We spend a great deal of time and energy trying to maintain these links so we hope that you will recognize this effort and credit us when you do make links from us. We try to make sure the links are all valid and they do what they say they are suppose to do but we can't guarantee that. We can also not garantee the accuracy of any translations from these links or services that people offer from these links.

How and Why
we do what we do

Here are the basic rules and reasons we follow when making the dictionary page, language course page and language chat page. We have used them and added to them since We started collecting links in December of 1995.

  1. The languages must be spoken by a population somewhere in the world. This means no artificial languages like Klingon (sorry all you trekkies)

  2. The dictionaries and language courses had to be online and not for download. We want people to be able to find the words they are looking for without having to unzip a file or configure any special software to do it. The only exception to this is where a user might need to be able to grab a font to read a language.

  3. The indexed dictionaries, language courses and chat sites must be free to the user. That's right FREE!!!! There are lots of places a person can go to pay for language education. We are trying to provide a starting point to get people interested in language.

  4. The languages will be listed alphabetically. We are not linguist and we don't understand language etymologies and neither do most users on the internet. We are listing the sites the way we feel most people browsing might look for a specific language. We have provided some links to sites that provide a more detailed look at languages for people who are interested in linguistics.

  5. On the dictionary page we feel it is important to let the user know if a dictionary had a searchable database. We did this because we personally like being able to search a database rather than scroll through pages of words.

  6. You may have noticed that we do not go into a great deal of discription on our pages. We do this because we had a person ask us to write that they had created the best dictionary online of one language. We thought that was arrogant to assume they were best and it would not be fair to the other people developing dictionaries of that language. We decided to make them all as equal as possible. We will not rate the dictionaries, language courses and chat sites. We want the users to explore the links and find out which sites are best for them.

  7. We will list the dictionaries, language courses and chat sites of the same language in the order we found them and that is why they are in the order they are in.

  8. We will list what type system a chat site is for the users. This way a user can determine if they have the ability to reach a site by telnet or the web and if it is a chat enviroment that they might be familiar with. Some people don't like MUD's and others don't like Web Chat.

  9. We will search for new links on a daily basis and add them as we see fit to the pages. We also try and check our links on a weekly basis to make sure they are all working. We will not add cute little "new site" graphics. Either the information you are seeking is on the site or it has not been created on the internet yet. If you do find a site we do not have that should be listed then please email us at info@word2word.com.

  10. We try to answer all of our email; however, request for us to do translation for you will usually go without a reply. We may add a list of people who provide that service in the future. We want you to explore the languages for yourself and we want to help you learn to be better communicators through language.

Now some people have asked us how we go about gathering the links so here it is. We have two methods for gathering links. They can be from any of the search engines or public indexing sites, or they can be recommended by one of our sites' users.

Finally we have one small warning for you. Offers of free translations tend to be from commercial sites trying to sell you something. We are not associated with these businesses; however, we have listed them at the request of many users. We do not guarantee the services any of these sites may promise you.

Thank You Site Developers

We hope the users will enjoy these links and find them a useful resource and we want to thank all the site developers who have made this possible. We do not have the time to contact every site we link to so If you are the owner of a link and you wish us to contact us about changes to or removal from our list email us at info@word2word.com and we will try to accomodate you.