Language Weaver announces three new languages — Bengali, Dari and Pashto (to and from English) — are now available for customers and integrators interested in expanding language coverage from automated translation software.

These new languages are part of Language Weaver’s ongoing commitment to deliver automated translation solutions for low density and less commonly taught languages. Due to the small amounts of existing data available, these languages are typically underserved by automated translation. Using proprietary methods, Language Weaver continues to deliver on its promise to create high quality language pairs, with minimal amounts of data, to meet customer needs.

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The following is an insert by David Houlihan, Aberdeen Group:

Founded in 2002, Language Weaver provides automated translation (or machine translation) solutions with a focus on supporting digital content and customer support. As such, the company possesses a value proposition that breaks with those typically articulated by machine translation vendors. Instead of translation process efficiency, Language Weaver stresses the role their solution plays supporting multi-lingual communication with customers across global markets.

Overview of the Business Solution

“The paradox of product launch,” Language Weaver President and CEO, Mark Tapling, states, “is that a company publishes support material in two languages when they have made a brand promise in thirty.” By failing to meet this promise, Tapling believes that companies impede their ability to business across the globe. Doing business in an international market invariably requires that companies deliver and support their products or services across a range of languages. While they often translate core publications and deliverables, companies frequently overlook the host of informal content that is supporting these markets. This kind of informal content ranges from user-generated material (such as reviews, recommendations, and forums comments) to information spread across customer support knowledge bases, email, and search results. Tapling argues that those unable to provide this content to a multi-language customer base experience unknowingly increase their support costs, degrade customer engagement and satisfaction, and overlook business opportunities.

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Daniel Marcu, co founder and CTO of Language Weaver discusses new government initiatives to meet the growing and evolving needs for this market.

Daniel Marcu, CTO

For those of you that are fans of NBC’s “The Office,” it probably comes as no surprise that fans have taken the fictional storyline from one of the episodes into the real world.

As reported by the New York Times over the weekend, Schrute farms, a fictional beet farm (turned bed & breakfast for one episode) has drawn and astonishing number of reviews on the popular travel review site TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com).

For loyal fans of “The Office,” around the world, Language Weaver has taken this spoof a step further. We have taken Schrute Farms global! Using trusted automated translation solutions trained for user reviews, Language Weaver automatically translates the English reviews into several languages. This has enabled fans globally to participate in this extension of the story line.

To write your own review or see what others have to say about their “visit,” check out Schrute Farms on the TripAdvisor site.

To see some of the reviews translated by Language Weaver, visit the pages below – look for the “translated by Language Weaver” icon.
• Spanish
• Italian
• French

NSD Co., Ltd., a leading systems integrator in Japan, and Language Weaver, today announced a strategic partnership and the establishment of a dedicated team to advance automated translation quality and capabilities for the Japanese market.

“As the second largest economy in the world, Japan is a leader in the export market; therefore, communicating in multiple languages is critical for the Japanese economy and ongoing growth of Japan businesses,” said Yoshikazu Imajo, president and COO of NSD. “Language Weaver has exhibited unique expertise in automated translation technology by improving quality through focused refinement efforts. We look forward to delivering a great solution to expand global communication opportunities.”

Under the terms of the agreement, NSD Co., Ltd will become the master distributor for Language Weaver in Japan and make a strategic investment in the company. NSD will also work closely with Language Weaver to engage Japanese businesses and speakers in an ongoing quality improvement program that will include calibration of TrustScore™ by native speakers. Announced last quarter, TrustScore enables customers to generate automatic language translation with a quality score to ensure better customer communications.

“Internet growth in Asia is significant but most of the information on the Web is inaccessible because of a language barrier. This partnership enables Language Weaver to prove its quality in the Asian market,” said Mark Tapling, president and CEO of Language Weaver. “NSD has a long history of providing innovative solutions to the Japanese market for technology users. As a local leader with wide reach, NSD is positioned to deliver a successful translation solution in the Japanese market.”

The following is an insert from Ryan Kim, Chronicle Staff Writer, for Smart phones may one day be translators article, published on February 28, 2010:

In science fiction, characters often turn to a portable universal translator to help bridge the linguistic divide, either among humans or with aliens.

But the concept doesn’t just exist in the imagination of “Star Trek” writers or the pages of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Researchers are actually closing in on the technology and foresee its application in the coming years in a very familiar device: the smart phone.

Imagine walking into a restaurant in Beijing and ordering off the menu and talking with waiters in Chinese. It’s a future that is on the way to becoming a reality.

Google, which is at the forefront of this consumer application, talked of its progress this month in bringing near real-time translation, both voice and text, to a smart phone. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed off a smart-phone feature that allows a user to take a picture of German text and have it quickly translated into English using optical character recognition software and Google Translate technology.

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