Voice Processing: Lernout & Hauspie and Lotus to Offer Notes Users Multilingual Document Translation Solution - Company Business and Marketing

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Feb 15, 1999

Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced Monday that Lotus Development Corp. and its business partners plan to offer L&H's recently launched L&H iTranslator Products with Lotus' Domino Server to support multilingual machine translation capabilities in Lotus Notes and Domino 4.6 and R5. The machine translation services are expected to provide Lotus Notes and Domino users with document and e-mail translation in more than fifteen language pairs, allowing them to quickly and cost-effectively access multilingual information.

L&H, a worldwide market leader in speech and linguistic technologies, products and services, has been named a Lotus business partner and will also sell and support the solution. "According to recently published analysts reports, a majority of Internet users are expected to live in countries other than the United States. This creates a need for access to multilingual documents and information on the Internet," said Patrick De Schrijver, president of L&H's Speech & Language Technologies and Solutions Division. "By creating a translation solution for Notes and Domino, the world's largest messaging and collaboration user base, L&H and Lotus expect to provide millions of users worldwide with a true global communication and information exchange solution." "We believe this is an outstanding opportunity for Lotus, Domino developers, Lotus business partners and L&H," De Schrijver continued. "Lotus and its 20,000 business partners and developers will be able to offer high quality multilingual translation solutions with support for many languages to Notes users, the world's largest collaboration user base." L&H's translation solutions address the needs of international companies that share multi-lingual documents over enterprise networks and the Internet. L&H's iTranslator Products employ machine translation software to translate, "on-the-fly", text found in e-mail, documents and web sites. Machine translation software, like that employed in L&H's iTranslator, uses sophisticated language models and Natural Language Technology, which breaks down and analyzes complete sentences to yield high translation accuracy rates. The combination of these services offers users not only higher quality translations, but also improved productivity. "The Notes and Domino user base is comprised of companies and individuals from all over the world, all of whom depend on Notes and the Internet for timely, business-critical information," said Thierry Mayeur, Lotus' senior product manager of Global Solutions. "L&H's iTranslator products are truly a global solution that will advance Domino as a web application platform for users to quickly and cost effectively access and understand important information in many languages." Lotus Notes clients can access L&H's iTranslator Products via a gateway connecting all Lotus Domino-based applications and the L&H machine translation engines. The Domino Translation Object (DTO), developed by Lotus, enables a connection between the Domino-based applications and the gateway. Combined, these technologies give Lotus Domino application developers the tools necessary to integrate high performance machine translation capabilities into their applications for intranets and the Internet. Languages Supported All language pairs currently supported by L&H iTranslator will be also available as part of the L&H/Lotus solution. These pairs include English to and from Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. Intra-European language pairs will include German to and from French, German to and from Italian, Italian to and from Spanish and Italian to and from French. Lotus Development Corporation, founded in 1982, is a subsidiary of IBM Corporation. Lotus offers high quality software products and services that reflect the company's unique understanding of the new ways in which individuals and businesses must work together to achieve success. Lotus' innovative approach is evident in a new class of applications that allow users to access and communicate information in ways never before possible, both within and beyond organizational boundaries. Lotus now markets its products in more than 80 countries worldwide and provides numerous professional consulting, support and education services through the Lotus Services Group. Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products (L&H) is a global leader in advanced speech and language solutions for computers, automobiles, telecommunications, embedded products, consumer goods and the Internet. The company is making the speech user interface (SUI) the keystone of simple, convenient interaction between humans and technology, and is using advanced translation technology to break down cultural barriers. L&H's products and services originate in four basic areas: automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), digital speech and music compression (SMC) and text-to-text (translation). FMI: www.lhs.com.