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As
an Englishman and therefore a native English speaker,
I have the good fortune to be fluent in the dominant
language of business - at least in the Western Hemisphere.
Living in England as I do, I am surrounded by, and conduct
my every day activities in, my native language; consequently
I generally think no more about the language I am communicating
in than I do about breathing. Furthermore, like most
native English speakers I exhibit a certain arrogance,
and I tend to make assumptions about the rest of the
non-English speaking world such as; they can all read,
write and speak English as well as I can.
So you will understand
that it was somewhat of a shock for me to find out
recently some of the amazing statistics pertinent
to the translation market. For a start, people with
English as a first language only represent 36% of
the world's population today and this will decline
dramatically to 15% by 2008. Given this fact it is
only a little less surprising to learn that free Internet
based translations provided by online services from
the likes of Google and Babelfish now number over
3 billion each month!
The market for corporate
text translation is mainly served by professional
services organizations, whose combined turnover exceeds
$10bn annually. By contrast, so far, corporations
have not adopted existing automated translation tools
for addressing the need for written day-to-day communications
such as email. At the time of writing the combined
turnover of machine translation vendors only amounts
to $130M. Even relatively small corporates with international
business requirements can spend upwards of 500,000
per year on professional translation services.
The clear implication
from these statistics is that there is a potentially
huge market opportunity here. One company that is
intending to fully exploit this market opportunity
is Translution.
Translution is unique
in its ease-of-use, quality and pricing. For example,
it integrates corporate dictionaries with best of
breed machine translation to offer a straightforward
email translation capability. Users simply write their
emails in their own language, review the meaning of
terms that are specific to their company, press the
Send button, and the recipients will receive the emails
automatically translated into their own language.
Translution's technology
is composed of five main components:
Integration: technology for email, web,
MS Office, specialized machine translation tools.
Personalization: personal and shared corporate
dictionaries, translation preferences.
Ease of Use: multi-lingual conversations,
seamless add-ons to existing tools, review tools.
Accuracy Tools: word disambiguation tools,
named entity recognizers, alternative word meanings.
Content: access to human translation archives,
industry dictionaries
.
Translution was formed
in August 2002 to develop technologies which will
enable people and organisations to improve communications
by removing language barriers. Translution is a hosted
services provider that operates the best computer
aided translation technology available on the market.
Translution's technology works by automatically re-directing
emails, web pages and electronic documents to a centrally
based translation facility which houses a number of
best-in-class licensed machine translation engines
from third party organisations.
Based in Malvern, Worcestershire,
Translution currently employs 7 people and has raised
£1.1M of funds to date. It is currently completing
the development of its products in partnership with
an India-based off-shore contractor, Sonata.
Ariadne Capital is currently
working with Translution to both raise funds and assist
in business development and marketing activities.
If you want to know more
about Translution then please email: translution@ariadnecapital.com
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Ariadne
Capital Journal - Through the Maze Volume
5, Edition 2
