There are thousands of ways in which cultures and countries differ, and most of these are computerizable to change as one goes from one culture to the other. They include laws, customs, business practices, ethics, currency conversions, clothing size differences, metric versus English system differences, etc., etc. Enterprising companies will be capturing and programming these differences and selling products and services to help the peoples of the world communicate better. Once this kind of thing is widespread, it will truly contribute to international understanding."
Logos is an international company (US, Canada and Europe) specialized in machine translation for 25 years, which provides various translation tools, machine translation systems and supporting services.
SYSTRAN (an acronym for System Translation) is a company specialized in machine translation software. SYSTRAN's headquarters are located in Soisy-sous-Montmorency, France. Sales and marketing, along with most development, operate out of its subsidiary, in La Jolla, California. The SYSTRAN site gives an interesting overview of the company's history. One of the company's products is AltaVista Translation, an automatic translation service of English Web pages into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish, and vice versa, and is available on the AltaVista site, the most frequently used search engine on the Web.
Based in Montreal, Canada, Alis Technologies is an international company specialized in the development and marketing of language handling solutions and services, particularly at language implementation in the IT industry. Alis Translation Solutions (ATS) offers a wide selection of applications and languages, and multiple tools and services for best possible translation quality. Language Technology Solutions (LTS) is devoted to commercializing advanced tools and services in the field of language engineering and information technology. The unilingual information systems are transformed into software that users can put to work in their own language (90 languages covered).
Another machine translation development is SPANAM and ENGSPAN, which are fully automatic machine translation systems developed and maintained by the computational linguists, translators, and systems programmer of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Washington, D.C. The PAHO Translation Unit has used SPANAM (Spanish to English) and ENGSPAN (English to Spanish) to process over 25 million words since 1980. Staff and free-lance translators postedit the raw output to produce high-quality translations with a 30-50% gain in productivity. The system is installed on a local area network at PAHO Headquarters and is used regularly by staff in the technical and administrative units. The software is also installed in a number of PAHO field offices and has been licensed to public and non-profit institutions in the US, Latin America, and Spain.
Some associations also contribute to machine translation development.
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the main international scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving natural language and computation. Published by MIT Press, the ACL quarterly journal, Computational Linguistics (ISSN 0891-2017), continues to be the primary forum for research on computational linguistics and natural language processing. The Finite String is its newsletter supplement. The European branch of ACL is the European Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics (EACL), which provides a regional focus for its members.
The International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT) heads a worldwide network with three regional components: the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA), the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) and the Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation (AAMT).
The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) presents itself as an association dedicated to anyone interested in the translation of languages using computers in some way. It has members in Canada, Latin America, and the United States. This includes people with translation needs, commercial system developers, researchers, sponsors, and people studying, evaluating, and understanding the science of machine translation and educating the public on important scientific techniques and principles involved.
The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) is based in Geneva, Switzerland. This organization serves the growing community of people interested in MT (machine translation) and translation tools, including users, developers, and researchers of this increasingly viable technology.