Machine translation is use of computational techniques to translate text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages.
Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related to information retrieval, knowledge representation and computational linguistics, a subfield of linguistics. Typically data is collected in text corpora, using either rule-based, statistical or neural-based approaches in machine learning and deep learning.
SYSTRAN, founded by Dr. Peter Toma in 1968, is one of the oldest machine translation companies. SYSTRAN has done extensive work for the United States Department of Defense and the European Commission.
A translation management system (TMS), formerly globalization management system (GMS), is a type of software for automating many parts of the human language translation process and maximizing translator efficiency. The idea of a translation management system is to automate all repeatable and non-essential work that can be done by software/systems and leaving only the creative work of translation and review to be done by human beings. A translation management system generally includes at least two types of technology: process management technology to automate the flow of work, and linguistic technology to aid the translator.
Statistical machine translation (SMT) was a machine translation approach, that superseded the previous, rule-based approach because it required explicit description of each and every linguistic rule, which was costly, and which often did not generalize to other languages. Since 2003, the statistical approach itself has been gradually superseded by the deep learning-based neural machine translation.
OpenLogos is an open source program that translates from English and German into French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. It accepts various document formats and maintains the format of the original document in translation. OpenLogos does not claim to replace human translators; rather, it aims to enhance the human translator's work environment.
SDL plc was a multinational professional services company headquartered in Maidenhead, United Kingdom. SDL specialized in language translation software and services. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange until it was acquired by RWS Group in November 2020.
Trados Studio is a computer-assisted translation software tool which provides a comprehensive platform for translation tasks, including editing, reviewing, and project management. It is available both as a local desktop tool or online. Trados, owned by RWS, also provides a suite of intelligent machine translation products.
Microsoft Translator or Bing Translator is a multilingual machine translation cloud service provided by Microsoft. Microsoft Translator is a part of Microsoft Cognitive Services and integrated across multiple consumer, developer, and enterprise products, including Bing, Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Lync, Yammer, Skype Translator, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Translator apps for Windows, Windows Phone, iPhone and Apple Watch, and Android phone and Android Wear.
Applications Technology (AppTek) is a U.S. company headquartered in McLean, Virginia that specializes in artificial intelligence and machine learning for human language technologies. The company provides both managed and professional services for natural language processing (NLP) technologies including automatic speech recognition (ASR), neural machine translation (MT), natural-language understanding (NLU) and neural speech synthesis. AppTek's automatic speech recognition covers over 45 languages and dialects. The neural MT engine covers over 1000 language pairs between languages.
RWS Group, known commercially as RWS, is a British company that provides intellectual property translation, filing and search services, technical and commercial translation and localization, and develops and supports translation productivity and management software.
Philipp Koehn is a computer scientist and researcher in the field of machine translation. His primary research interest is statistical machine translation and he is one of the inventors of a method called phrase based machine translation. This is a sub-field of statistical translation methods that employs sequences of words as the basis of translation, expanding the previous word based approaches. A 2003 paper which he authored with Franz Josef Och and Daniel Marcu called Statistical phrase-based translation has attracted wide attention in Machine translation community and has been cited over a thousand times. Phrase based methods are widely used in machine translation applications in industry.
ProMT is a lead Russian developer of language translation software for businesses and private users since 1991. The company provides on-premises software based on neural technologies.
MultiTerm is a terminology management tool providing one solution to store and manage multilingual terminology.
Machine translation (MT) algorithms may be classified by their operating principle. MT may be based on a set of linguistic rules, or on large bodies (corpora) of already existing parallel texts. Rule-based methodologies may consist in a direct word-by-word translation, or operate via a more abstract representation of meaning: a representation either specific to the language pair, or a language-independent interlingua. Corpora-based methodologies rely on machine learning and may follow specific examples taken from the parallel texts, or may calculate statistical probabilities to select a preferred option out of all possible translations.
Hybrid machine translation is a method of machine translation that is characterized by the use of multiple machine translation approaches within a single machine translation system. The motivation for developing hybrid machine translation systems stems from the failure of any single technique to achieve a satisfactory level of accuracy. Many hybrid machine translation systems have been successful in improving the accuracy of the translations, and there are several popular machine translation systems which employ hybrid methods.
Smartcat is a cloud-based translation and localization platform that connects businesses, translators, and translation agencies in a single Connected Translation delivery loop. The platform positions itself as an "all-in-one" translation platform, combining CAT, TMS, and other translation technologies.
Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) was a neural machine translation (NMT) system developed by Google and introduced in November 2016 that used an artificial neural network to increase fluency and accuracy in Google Translate. The neural network consisted of two main blocks, an encoder and a decoder, both of LSTM architecture with 8 1024-wide layers each and a simple 1-layer 1024-wide feedforward attention mechanism connecting them. The total number of parameters has been variously described as over 160 million, approximately 210 million, 278 million or 380 million. It used WordPiece tokenizer, and beam search decoding strategy. It ran on Tensor Processing Units.
Memsource is a cloud-based commercial translation management system and computer-assisted translation (CAT) tool. It is developed by Memsource a.s., headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic. According to research by Deloitte, in 2020 Memsource a.s was one of the top 50 fastest growing IT companies in the Czech Republic.
Marco Trombetti is an Italian computer scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and ocean sailor. He co-founded Translated, a pioneer of artificial intelligence in the language industry. Through Translated, he helped develop the first AI-powered open-source Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tool, Matecat, which also introduced the first adaptive machine translation system. He is considered one of the most influential leaders and innovators in the language industry. His research on progress toward the language singularity, presented during a keynote at the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) conference in 2022, has provided invaluable insights into the field of artificial intelligence.
