RASMAT 2004

1
RASMAT 2004 Uppsala

• Business Needs
• and Practices
• Pierre-Yves Foucou
• CTO - SYSTRAN

2
Fast Facts

• Market leading Machine Translation (MT)
  technology developer more than 500 person
  years of RD
• Sells desktop translation software products
• Offers more scalable and open translation
  solutions for large corporations
• Founded in 1968 in San Diego, CA
• Located in Paris, France - San Diego, CA -
  Luxembourg

3
History

• Company founded, US Air Force contracts SYSTRAN
  to develop a Russian into English system
• NASA uses SYSTRANs MT in the joint US-USSR
  Apollo-Soyuz
• Mission
• European Commission hires SYSTRAN to
  develop several
• language pairs
• SYSTRAN introduces Windows desktop product
• AltaVista and SYSTRAN launch Babelfish
• 2002 OracleMobile.com selects SYSTRAN for
  wireless portal

4
Customers

• Technology Licensing to Portals
• Google, AOL, AltaVista/Yahoo, Lycos, Apple, ...
• Corporations
• Ford Motor Company, PMI, PwC, Michelin
• Governments and Public Administrations
• US Intelligence Community, European Commission
• OEM Integration
• Logitech, Electronic Arts
• Channel for Desktop Products
• eDistributor (Digital River), VARs, Resellers

5
What is Machine Translation?

• Process that utilizes computer software to
  translate text from one natural language into
  another
• Accounts for grammatical structure of each
  language and uses rules and assumptions to
  transfer these from the source language
  (original text) into the target language
  (translated text)

6
Why We Need MTEnglish is Not the Dominant
Language
7
Needs

• Gisting
• Multilingual information scanning
• Produces rough draft translation
• For example Web browsing
• Publishing
• Documentation requires high-quality translation
• For example technical support documents
• OEM, knowledge base applications

8
Desktop Products

• Easy to install, use, ...
• Translate
• Documents
• DOC, RTF, PPT, XLS,
• TXT, HTML, XML
• Email
• Outlook
• Web content
• Chat

9
Desktop Products version 5

• XML, extended control on MT process, automatic
  coding TM
• Introducing SwedishltgtEnglish

10
MS Word File Translation
11
Web Page Translation
12
Quality Assessment

• http//rm.systransoft.com
• (cf AMTA 2003)

13
Quality Assessment

• Per language pair
• Per document
• Per sentence
• Review Manager (SLP)

14
Maintenance or development

• Core engine, core dictionaries
• User specific resource tools
• GUI and APIs
• Additional language pairs
• More integration CMS, CRM, ...

15
Benefits of MT

• Builds and manages knowledge assets
• Proven savings in overall budgets
• ROI Reuse of texts already translated,
  terminology management

16
Learning Points in Applying MT in Real Business
Context

• Educate users and manage their expectations
• Use rapid prototyping for a phased implementation
• Set goals and metrics for final results
• Narrow the gap between human translators and MT

17
The SYSTRAN Advantage

• 36 language pairs, with more in development
• Scalable, robust and open architecture
• Accumulation of million entry knowledge-bases
• Ability to customize linguistic resources
• Over 7 million translations per day
• Proven track record