Tiny Spanish Software Firm to Present Ground-Breaking English-Spanish Machine Translator at CeBIT IT Trade Fair
CeBIT
Granada, Spain, Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Industry heavyweights—including companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft–have a surprise in store for them at the 2010 CeBIT trade fair in Hannover, Germany the first week in March. MTC Soft, a tiny—15 employees–Spanish software firm will be challenging their primacy in automatic translation from English into Spanish with VICTOR Translator, a ground-breaking new product.
This new machine translator, which debuted in Barcelona last October, aroused a lot of interest in translation circles due both to its innovative approach to the problem and to its sparkling results. “What was clear from the beginning,” says Fernando Moreno-Torres, MTC Soft’s CEO, “was that nobody had achieved a level of translation from English to Spanish sufficiently exact for professional use, and to do so would require a fresh analysis of the problem.”
That “fresh analysis” came from a 20-year-veteran translator from the European Commissionin Brussels. “She had worked with all the most important machine translators,” says Moreno-Torres, “and was intimately acquainted with their strengths and weaknesses. That specific experience in the field, coupled with her professional formation in linguistics, permitted her to create a totally new approach to the problem, an outline which made everything possible. The secret lay in a previous linguistic analysis of the text. Based on this fresh start, our programmers were able to come up with the breakthrough. In the end their solution entails submitting each word of the text to 180 parsing and analysis routines. The whole development process took nearly 10 years.”
Does this mean we now have a human-quality translator for professional use? “Not quite yet,” says the MTC Soft director, “but we’re getting a lot closer. With an effectiveness index of 95%–and rising–the translations done by VICTOR require a minimum of revision and represent a highly-viable commercial proposition today.”
What’s so unique about VICTOR Translator? “The answer to that question is simple,” says Moreno-Torres, “VICTOR Translator makes good translations, something not achieved yet by any other English-Spanish automatic translator on the market.” He adds, “The reason that machine translators return so many erroneous and irrelevant results is that they only read the words in the documents translated, not the sense of the words. With its rigorous linguistic analysis approach VICTOR Translator changes all that. Now English-to-Spanish translation clients have access, for the first time, to near-human-quality translations.”
Your contact for further information at CeBIT 2010
Fernando Moreno-Torres
Hall 3 Stand D17 (7) MTC Soft stand at the Spanish area
Mobile: +34 609 575 000
Email: direccion@mtcsoft.es