Earthquakes, Hurricanes, and APIs

I was planning on a quiet August. But the dog days of this August have been anything but quiet or dull. Breaking news has been interrupted by more breaking news. Libya was pre-empted by a rare east-cost 5.8 magnitude earthquake, with an epicenter near Washington (prompting political jokes such as the Earthquake was all Obama’s or Bush’s ”fault”, depending on your political persuasion.) Then the earthquake was pre-empted by Hurricane Irene barrelling up the east coast.

Stuck somewhere in between the earthquake and Irene was Google’s announcement of its translate API v2 — a pay-for-play version of its translate API.  Although I am a competitor to Google, I view this announcement as a positive thing. The paid version establishes value for a translation tool that was once free. In a sense, Google is helping to legitimize the market for machine translation.

At Lionbridge we are taking a different approach than Google’s to machine translation. Whereas Google Translate offers basic “gisting” machine translation, Lionbridge’s GeoFluent provides enterprise-scale, proven, customized machine translation technology that features:

• Rapid customization to reflect each organization’s brand, products, terminology and expertise, making translation comprehensible and actionable. 
• Seamless API integration with leading enterprise chat applications, enterprise web properties, user forums and other content that requires on-demand, comprehensive translation.
• An easy-to-deploy, “translate now” cloud application that can be rapidly integrated into enterprise web sites, allowing visitors to instantly translate Web pages and communications on demand. 
• An enterprise-scale, multi-tenant platform that protects intellectual property and language assets to allow privacy and security of multilingual communication.
• Scalability for handling enterprise-level volumes of usage.

For more information, please read our announcement, or go to our web site devoted to real-time multilingual translation.