SYSTRAN

SYSTRAN, founded by Dr. Peter Toma in 1968, is one of the oldest machine translation companies. SYSTRAN has done extensive work for the United States Department of Defense and the European Commission.

SYSTRAN provides the technology for Yahoo! and AltaVista's (Babel Fish) among others, but was recently dropped by all of the language combinations offered by Google's language tools.

Commercial versions of SYSTRAN run under Microsoft Windows (including Windows Mobile), Linux and Solaris.

History

With roots in the Georgetown machine translation effort, SYSTRAN was one of the few machine translation systems to survive the major cut in funding after the ALPAC Report came out in the mid-1960's. The company was set up in La Jolla, California to work on Russian into English for the United States Air Force in the middle of the Cold War. Large numbers of Russian scientific and technical documents were translated using SYSTRAN under the auspices of the USAF Foreign Technology Division (later the National Air and Space Intelligence Center) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. The quality of the translations, although somewhat rough, was usually adequate for understanding content.

The company was sold in 1986 to the Gachot family, based in Paris, France, and is now a publicly traded company on the French stock exchange. It has a main office at the Grande Arche in La Defense and maintains a secondary office in La Jolla, San Diego, California.

Languages

Here is a list of the source and target languages SYSTRAN works with. Many of the pairs are to or from English or French.

• Russian into English (1968)
• English into Russian (1973) for the Apollo-Soyuz project
• English source (1975) for the European Commission
• Arabic
• Chinese
• Danish
• Dutch
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hindi
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Norwegian
• Serbo-Croatian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Persian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Ukrainian
• Urdu

See also

• Comparison of Machine translation applications

External links

• SYSTRAN website