Noted inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil is predicting that in a few years, one-quarter of the world’s population will be communicating across different languages via automated language translation software like Language Weaver’s.

Referring to a Jupiter research report predicting that 25 percent of world’s population will be online by 2012, Kurzweil predicts that language differences will no longer be a barrier to communication:

[Kurzweil] cites current developments in the speed and accuracy of statistical translation systems, which have improved exponentially in the past 10 years, such as Language Weaver’s automatic language translation software, which can now translate between 2,000 and 5,000 words per minute on a single CPU, using proprietary statistical translation algorithms.

According to a career summary posted on his website, Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. Ray’s books include The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. Four of Ray’s books have been national best sellers and The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray Kurzweil’s new book, published by Viking Press, is entitled The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology.

To read the full article about Kurzweil’s predictions on KurzweilAI.net, click here.

Technorati Tags: Ray Kurzweil, Translation, Language Weaver, Jupiter Research, Internet

In Berlin at Localization World, a global conference that focuses on translation and localization, Language Weaver CEO Mark Tapling said today that the future is bright for Language Service Providers (LSPs) who embrace statistical machine translation as a tool to greatly expand business and increase margins.

CEO MARK TAPLING

“The Language Weaver value proposition consists of three key elements – speed, volume and accuracy,” said Tapling. “Language Service Providers (LSPs) share the same goals – and so we’re able to provide great value to our LSP partners.” 

“With our technology we continue to broaden the amount of content that is translated,” said Tapling. ”However, the human linguist will always have a high value-add role to play in the process.”

You can listen to an 8 minute interview with Mark Tapling here, or Subscribe to the Language Weaver Podcast.

Technorati Tags: Translations, translation, Language Weaver, Localization, Localization World, Language Service Providers, Mark Tapling

William Wong, one of Language Weaver’s co-founders, was recently interviewed by Ann Convery of BNET.com. Excerpts of the video interview can be found on BNET’s “Dog and Pony” video section here on their website.

In the interview, William talks about how Language Weaver started, some of the business to business (B2B) services that we provide, and the benefits of breaking the language barrier for businesses (with a small plug for kontrib.com!).

[William Wong: Optimizing Business Communications Interview on BNET.com]

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