SYSTRAN Awarded a First Place Ranking for Translation Quality at WMT Competition

Business Wire, May 28, 2009

SYSTRAN’s ground breaking hybrid machine translation engine outperforms Google and others in English to French translation

PARIS & SAN DIEGO -- SYSTRAN, the leading provider of language translation technologies, today announced that it ranked first in an English to French translation task at the fourth annual Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation in Athens, Greece. This workshop, which was part of the EACL 2009 Conference, was organized by Philipp Koehn, PhD, a recognized scientist in statistical machine translation. The goal of the competition was to compare the quality of multiple machine translation systems for 10 European language pairs, and to set up objective evaluation criteria for machine translation quality.

SYSTRAN’s latest innovation, a hybrid approach to machine translation, outperformed Google Translation, academic statistical machine translation (MT) systems and several rule-based systems in the category of English to French News Translation. Making smart use of a reasonable size training corpus, SYSTRAN delivered more accurate translation than very large systems like Google, which rely on a gigantic language model that is based on a Web index. SYSTRAN’s hybrid MT engine will be officially released in Enterprise Server 7 on June 3, 2009.

SYSTRAN Enterprise Server 7, the first hybrid machine translation (MT) product designed for enterprise use, is based on a combination of self-learning and linguistic technologies. SYSTRAN 7 delivers highly consistent and quality translations, while significantly reducing the cost and time to customize the software.

“SYSTRAN’s unique hybrid technology, which uses both deep linguistic analysis and self-learning, outperforms any other approach,” said Dimitris Sabatakakis, CEO of SYSTRAN. “Our hybrid technology is designed to learn from fewer resources and is perfectly suited for high-quality specialized translation. As we have done for many years, SYSTRAN continues to be the leading innovator in the machine translation market.”

Philipp Koehn, a statistical machine translation expert and the workshop organizer said, “this workshop demonstrated that the rule-based approach combined with statistical and other techniques leads to highly competitive MT systems.”

About SYSTRAN

SYSTRAN is the market leading provider of language translation software products and solutions for the desktop, enterprise and Internet that facilitate communication in 52 language combinations and in 20 vertical domains.

With over four decades of expertise and research and development, SYSTRAN’s software is the choice of leading global corporations, portals including AltaVista, Yahoo!, and Apple, and public agencies like the US Intelligence Community and the European Commission.

Use of SYSTRAN products and solutions enhance multilingual communication and increase user productivity and time-savings for B2E, B2B and B2C market segments as they deliver real-time language solutions for search, content management, online customer support, intra or inter company collaboration, and eCommerce.

SYSTRAN is headquartered in Paris, France with a North American office located in San Diego, California, USA.

SYSTRAN (Code ISIN FR0004109197, Bloomberg: SYST NM, Reuters: SYTN.LN) is listed on EuroNext Paris, Compartiment C. For more information, visit www.systransoft.com.