Based in Ieper (Belgium) and Burlington (Massachussets, USA), Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) is an international leader in the development of advanced speech technology for various commercial applications and products. The company offers four core technologies - automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), text-to-text and digital speech compression. Its ASR, TTS and digital speech compression technologies are licensed to main companies in the telecommunications, computers and multimedia, consumer electronics and automotive electronics industries. Its text-to-text (translation) services are provided to information technology (IT) companies and vertical and automation markets.
The Machine Translation Group of Lernout & Hauspie comprises enterprises that develop, produce, and market highly sophisticated machine translation systems: L&H Language Technology, AppTek, AILogic, NeocorTech and Globalink. Each is an international leader in its particular segment.
Founded in 1990, Globalink is a major U.S. company in language translation software and services, which offers customized translation solutions built around a range of software products, on-line options and professional translation services. The company publishes language translation software products in Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian and English, and finds solutions to translation problems faced by individuals and small businesses, to multinational corporations and governments (a stand-alone product that gives a fast, draft translation or a full system to manage professional document translations). Globalink explains its corporate information on its website as follows:
"With Globalink's translation applications, the computer uses three sets of data: the input text, the translation program and permanent knowledge sources (containing a dictionary of words and phrases of the source language), and information about the concepts evoked by the dictionary and rules for sentence development. These rules are in the form of linguistic rules for syntax and grammar, and some are algorithms governing verb conjugation, syntax adjustment, gender and number agreement and word re-ordering.
Once the user has selected the text and set the machine translation process in motion the program begins to match words of the input text with those stored in its dictionary. Once a match is found, the application brings up a complete record that includes information on possible meanings of the word and its contextual relationship to other words that occur in the same sentence. The time required for the translation depends on the length of the text. A three-page, 750-word document takes about three minutes to render a first draft translation."
Randy Hobler is a Marketing Consultant for Globalink. He is currently acting as the Product Marketing Manager for Globalink's suite of Internet based products and services. In his e-mail of 3 September 1998, he wrote:
"85% of the content of the Web in 1998 is in English and going down. This trend is driven not only by more websites and users in non-English-speaking countries, but by increasing localization of company and organization sites, and increasing use of machine translation to/from various languages to translate websites.
Because the Internet has no national boundaries, the organization of users is bounded by other criteria driven by the medium itself. In terms of multilingualism, you have virtual communities, for example, of what I call 'Language Nations'… all those people on the Internet wherever they may be, for whom a given language is their native language. Thus, the Spanish Language nation includes not only Spanish and Latin American users, but millions of Hispanic users in the US, as well as odd places like Spanish-speaking Morocco.
Language Transparency: We are rapidly reaching the point where highly accurate machine translation of text and speech will be so common as to be embedded in computer platforms, and even in chips in various ways. At that point, and as the growth of the Web slows, the accuracy of language translation hits 98% plus, and the saturation of language pairs has covered the vast majority of the market, language transparency (any-language-to-any-language communication) will be too limiting a vision for those selling this technology. The next development will be 'transcultural, transnational transparency', in which other aspects of human communication, commerce and transactions beyond language alone will come into play. For example, gesture has meaning, facial movement has meaning and this varies among societies. The thumb-index finger circle means 'OK' in the United States. In Argentina, it is an obscene gesture.
When the inevitable growth of multi-media, multi-lingual videoconferencing comes about, it will be necessary to 'visually edit' gestures on the fly. The MIT Media Lab [MIT: Massachussets Institute of Technology], Microsoft and many others are working on computer recognition of facial expressions, biometric access identification via the face, etc. It won't be any good for a U.S. business person to be making a great point in a Web-based multi-lingual video conference to an Argentinian, having his words translated into perfect Argentinian Spanish if he makes the 'O' gesture at the same time. Computers can intercept this kind of thing and edit them on the fly.