It has been a decade since Google Translate took machine translation to the masses — a topic for a future post.
But most companies will not be using Google Translate anytime soon to power their machine translation efforts. They want more control over customizing the engine, leveraging existing translation memories, and other capabilities that Google doesn’t yet offer. So they turn to vendors such as Microsoft, SDL, and SYSTRAN, a company that pioneered machine translation decades ago.
SYSTRAN was acquired by a Korean machine translation company in 2014 and earlier this year launched an online machine translation platform called SYSTRAN.io. This platform allows companies to leverage machine translation (and other services) via API. In other words, you don’t have to purchase an expensive enterprise license or host any software — you just connect your software to SYSTRAN’s engine. And, perhaps best of all, SYSTRAN has allowed anyone to take a free test drive of roughly a million characters of translation per month.
To learn more, here’s a Q&A I recently conducted with the company:
What are the benefits/solutions that SYSTRAN.io provides?
SYSTRAN.io allows software developers, customer experience (CX) companies, multi-national marketing departments, social media and marketing technology companies, and online gaming developers to access the same software to develop multilingual applications that were once only available to large, international companies.
How many language pairs are supported?
There are up to 50 languages supported, depending on the particular module.
What is the most popular usage model (so far) for SYSTRAN.io?
In terms of volume of user queries:
So far, the most popular usage is for language translation on mobile devices.
In terms of numbers of solutions built:
Language translation within customer support forums is strong because companies and customer-support, software-as-a-service agencies can translate large numbers of documents in their FAQ knowledge base. This helps decrease call volume (the highest operational cost of customer support) and increase customer satisfaction scores because users can find their answers faster.
How do you leverage the platform to conduct “sentiment analysis” of user-generated content?
The number of available media (social media, review sites, blogs, support forums) as part of the user experience are growing everyday, companies are receiving unstructured commentary across these platforms and in many different languages. Developers using a combination of SYSTRAN.io’s modules will enable that content – across multiple languages – to be mined for information in any language, for positive or negative comments, and then can categorize those comments and generate responses in the language of the user. Imagine 50,000 comments, where 20,000 rank negative, but 500 are extremely negative and defacing, Those are the ones you want to reply to first.
For example, with the Olympics coming up, imagine a brand is sponsoring an athlete and he gets caught the night before the big race for using enhancement drugs or for cheating on his wife – it hits social media fast. How do you respond if you don’t know about it because the comments are in multiple languages? Or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, imagine many fans see an athlete wearing a particular shoe or clothing item and they want to know where they can get it – and they are asking on twitter. Right now, there are many eCommerce sites and marketing agencies that are “listening” for those tweets in multiple languages and selling to customers online. Systran.io can make it easier for developers to make apps that listen in multiple languages and then respond in those same languages.
See this page for more info: https://platform.systran.net
Explain “anonymization” as a feature of your service
Because of laws such as the safe harbor act, law firms, financial publishers, and many other multi-national firms are required to remove “personal information” such as names, address, and social security numbers from any information they send overseas to their counterparts at another office. In this scenario, companies need to remove this information or “anonomyze” it from the large data set. Send a different packet or code with the personal information and their team mates can receive and assemble the data safely.
How is SYSTRAN.io different than SYSTRAN’s Enterprise platform?
SYSTRAN.io is based on the same language translation and NLP technology that powers SYSTRAN’s enterprise offering used by Symantec, Cisco, Airbus, Ford, Toyota, BNP Paribas, Daimler, Barclays, defense and security organizations such as the U.S. intelligence community, NATO, Interpol and language service providers. It is equally robust, but the security responsibility falls on the developer of the particular application for anything beyond what is already built-in for the SYSTRAN.io aspect. The enterprise server, on the other hand, offers increased security as it can be installed behind an organization’s firewall. Also, the enterprise server offers 130 language pairs.
How does SYSTRAN.io compete against existing web service offerings from competitors?
We don’t know of any pure language technology companies that are offering free usage of multilingual development APIs to developers, do you? We’ve seen technology companies attempt to enter the language translation technology space but they do not have the content necessary to accomplish viable translations. Language translation technology is easy to talk about but extremely difficult to accomplish.
For SYSTRAN, this has been our 100 percent focus for nearly half a century. Now we are opening those decades of language translation content to developers. These databases have been contributed from linguistic and intelligence knowledge workers who have compiled learnings and optimizations from trillions of translations served dating back to our first client – the US Air Force in 1968 during the Cold War – to today. Our translation databases are deep and robust.
I believe you are offering a million characters of translation for free per month – is that correct? How long will this offer last?
That is correct. Once you sign up you have a million free characters (plus free usage levels for the other API’s) per month, every month; we want to encourage people to use our tools and not burden them with a cost at the development stage. The end date is open for now.
