The
CEO of a Renault, a French car manufacturer, recently
introduced a new corporate policy: all internal communications
should be conducted in English - mainly to facilitate
the integration with their Asian business units.
As you may suspect, French engineers face a challenge
to quickly endorse this policy. Wouldn't it be nice
for them if they could rely on an automated translation
system?
Unlike the European Commission
who spend ~ 1billion annually on translation
services, corporations can only afford expert translation
services for the "official" documents component
of corporate communications. This high-end human-based
translation services market is worth $10Bn annually
and is very fragmented.
On the other end of the
spectrum of the translation services market, there
are free web-based tools. These have enjoyed a popularity
level that most people would under-estimate: Google
and Babylon alone perform over 2 billion translations
per month. The growing non-English internauts (internet
users) explains part of this appetite for translation:
today, the English-speaking internet users represent
35% of all internauts (see
http://www.glreach.com/globstats) and this percentage
will decrease to 18% by 2008 at the current rate of
internet adoption of non-English speakers.
Language technology has
matured considerably in the past 10 years. Concentrated
efforts have been made by various organizations and
projects:
Flanders Language Valley's
Fund was $125M, a fund related to Lernhaut&Hauspie
who employed 1,500 people focused on language technology
The European Union
has spent ~ 300M on sponsored research programs
Search engine technology
investments such as Google's R&D efforts to support
their ad-words and search business
A parallel could be drawn
with VoIP: internet telephony has been available since
the early 90's but it is only now that the technology
has reached a critical inflection point for it to
become widely used.
Machine translation vendors
are making tremendous progress in improving the quality
of translation. For example, they are currently working
on statistical-based technology that has proven to
be very effective in natural language search technology.
The vendor market is highly fragmented: large players
such as Systran have annual sales of ~ 10M, which
is small compared to human translation vendors. Machine
translation is still a niche business and their R&D
budgets are focused on selected technologies and language
pairs. Little R&D funding has been available to
create finished products that can meet corporate policies
such as the one implemented by Renault's CEO.
Translution is focused
on meeting corporate needs for ubiquitous automated
translation by providing integration, personalization
and greater usability.
Today, French engineers who need to send weekly progress
reports and meeting notes to their Japanese counterparts
face a challenge: they can use free-internet based
tools by copying and pasting fragments of text and
guessing multiple meanings out of context for their
company. They can also purchase a package offered
by a niche machine translation vendor. However neither
of these allow the organisation to share specialist
terms, which is the key to improving translation quality.
Translution solves the
decision dilemma for corporations: what vendor to
choose for all future needs? How much user training
will be required? How can it cope with the specifics
of our corporate terminology?
First of all, Translution
is an integration platform that enables companies
to use a mix of the best of breed translation tools
available on the market. By choosing Translution,
corporations gain on-going access to the rapidly evolving
machine translation technologies. Translution operates
these technologies centrally as an ASP so that the
most recent technologies are instantly available to
customers.
Translution's products
also morph into Microsoft's applications in a very
intuitive way, reducing end-user training to minutes
rather than hours. For example, a user writes an email
in his language, presses the Send button which triggers
Translution to send translated versions in each of
the languages specific to the recipients.
Corporations can build
centrally accessible dictionaries that are specific
to their business. This ensures that everyone uses
the same meaning of words in a consistent way and
this dramatically drives up the quality of translations.
Overall, Translution
fills the gap left between expensive, high-end human
translation services and free, internet-based services.
It thereby thrives at capturing part of the growing
market opportunity for multi-lingual communication
and collaboration, which analysts such as IDC predict
to exceed $58Billion by 2008.
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Ariadne
Capital Journal - Through the Maze Volume
5, Edition 1
