Language translation technology advances

by Doris Benavides

January 12, 2001 —

TRANSPARENT LANGUAGE, A developer of language technology, believes that it is necessary to cross language barriers for the success of corporations looking to expand overseas.

In the midst of the Comdex trade show here, the company announced the licensing of its latest version of Enterprise Translation Server 4.0 to Brady and Ipswich, Massachusetts-based EBSCO Publishing, a division of EBSCO Industries, in Birmingham, Alabama. The two companies join Transparent Language's list of a dozen customers already signed up for the service as well as some 30 companies that are trying it out at present. Most of these companies are interested in expanding into foreign markets, said Charles McGonagle, the company's vice president of marketing.

EBSCO is a provider of research databases for libraries and large businesses. With the translation service, EBSCO will enable its customers in Europe, Latin America, and the United States to access content from its Web-based search service EBSCOhost, in their native languages. Brady will make available the translation of documents for its global employees.

Enterprise Translation Server 4.0 runs on Windows NT 4.0 server. It enables real-time translation of plain text, Web pages, and document files over TCP/IP or Microsoft networking environment. Currently, it works with 25 language directions, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian.

"Our goal is to allow businesses to take the applications they use and make them multilingual, make them cross-languages. So we built an integration wire for programs like Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Power Point, Word, and Lotus Sametime instant messaging. Further on, customers will take the translation server and integrate it into their Web applications," McGonagle said.

The basic installation of the system for a single language direction and usage license will start at $25,000. A typical customer is paying somewhere between $60,000 and $100,000. This is a typical customer buying several language directions and more than one usage license, he added.

Currently, Transparent Language only provides translation from any other language to English, but it is looking into the increased Internet usage among non-English speakers, with a majority of these located in Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

According to a Computer Economics study, by 2005 the number of Internet users worldwide that are English native speakers will drop from 54 percent in 1999 to 43 percent. Non-English speakers will make up the 57 percent.

Transparent Language will open a distributing office in México City in the near future. Early this year it signed an agreement with electronic retailer J&R Music and Computer World (J&R). J&R will offer real-time translations from its electronic commerce Web site, as well as via StarMedia Network.

J&R will target the Spanish-speaking users with English-to-Spanish translations. The service -- to start anytime before year end -- will be initially opened in Puerto Rico.

Although the company is interested in adding language directions to its service, it has not yet found the way to translate text in languages that read from the right to left, like Hebrew and Arabic idioms.

The company provides two levels of support and training services; systems integration and linguistic support, which includes training in how to use Transparent Language's linguistic tools.

Transparent Language also providees a base-level consumer service ( www.freetranslation.com ) and its site Plustranslation.com is used by businesses and consumers to translate documents, McGonagle said.

As part of its future plans, the Merrimack, N.H.-based company will continue to focus on language directions and on integration. "We believe that the key to the translation server, which is an infrastructure, not an application, is the effort to make it available, easier to stamp into a lot of applications. We will continue to create strong integration with the Microsoft Office suites," McGonagle said.

The vendor has now added Korean to-and-from Japanese translations and French to-and-from Russian. Shortly it will offer Russian to-and-from German.

Doris Benavides is a Latin America copy editor for IDG News Service, an Infoworld affiliate, and is based in Huntington Beach, Calif.

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