[November 30, 2005]

Language Weaver Offers New Language Translation Module for Farsi; New Language Offering to Support Government Needs and Those of Multinational Companies Working with Middle Eastern Companies

LOS ANGELES --(Business Wire)-- Nov. 30, 2005 -- Language Weaver, a leading developer of enterprise software for the automation of human language translation, today announced the commercial availability of a bidirectional Farsi/English language pair module for its automated translation product. In Western countries Farsi is also referred to as Persian.

Language Weaver leads the automated translation market in developing high accuracy Eastern languages and developed the Farsi module in response to interest from several of its clients and prospects. According to William Wong, director of engineering for Language Weaver, the Farsi module ready for deployment is a general purpose translation system. Its performance can be customized to accurately translate industry-specific documents with additional customer-supplied training data.

"The more quality data we can use to train the system," Wong said, "the better the translation output. Using Language Weaver's Customizer, the first tool of its kind in the translation industry, our software continues to learn from previous translation efforts, creating a better return on a company's initial translation investment and improving the quality of future translations."

While the Middle East constitutes a growing business market for multinational corporations and a hotspot for government anti-terrorism activities, few machine translation systems have been developed to translate its languages to English due to several complexities, including the scarcity of pre-translated data for training of the system and a common character set shared by Farsi and Arabic. Although Language Weaver has an Arabic/English translation module using this common character set, the translation parameters are not directly transferable to Farsi because the sentence structure is different. For example, in Arabic the verb comes at the beginning of a sentence, while in Farsi the verb appears at the end of the sentence.

Language Weaver's statistical methodology is well suited to deal with these added complexities, and the company was able to produce a high quality Farsi/English system in a much shorter amount of time than it would have taken to develop a rule-based system for this language. Language pairs developed by Language Weaver draw on a foundation of improved algorithms and increasing computer power that is expected to continue as many more language pairs are added to the inventory in the coming year, producing ongoing quality improvements with consistency.

About Language Weaver

Language Weaver was founded in 2002 to commercialize a unique approach to automatic language translation using proprietary statistical translation algorithms that resulted from 20 person-years of invention and development at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI). Its resulting product, statistical machine translation software (SMTS), provides the highest quality output to date in automated translation using the best of traditional and new translation technologies. Language Weaver's translation systems produce fluent, natural sounding translations and save customers money and time through automation of the translation process. Language Weaver software enables cost-effective, real-time translations of unstructured documents, like Web-based customer communications and text-based research information. Its customers include both government and commercial enterprises.

The company has more than 50 patents pending on its SMTS technology worldwide. Bidirectional language pairs available include: Arabic/English, Chinese/English, Farsi/English, French/English and Spanish/English; unidirectional languages include Somali to English and Hindi to English. Language Weaver's software is available as licensed software in server and standalone versions. Website: www.languageweaver.com.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]

Discussions: