Global by Design

Language Weaver, a San Diego-based developer of machine translation software, scored additional funding from In-Q-Tel, the VC arm of the CIA (yes, even the CIA likes to gamble). It appears that Language Weaver has made great strides in creating software to effective machine translate Arabic. Given the CIA’s backlog of untranslated Arabic intelligence, this software can’t be delivered a minute too soon.

I noticed that the press release sizes the MT market at $4 billion. Not sure where they came up with the stat, but it certainly sounds nice. But I would agree tha MT appears to be coming into its own finally. Note to translators: I’m not implying you’ll be out of business anytime soon. But I am saying that MT is going to find its niche and this niche will grow exponentially. There is simply not enough translators in the world to handle the content necessary in this increasingly global economy.

Here’s the press release.

• Language Weaver adds language pairs
• Machine translation gets specialized
• SDL Acquires Arabic Language Services Firm
• Machine Translation Vendor Scores Funding
• Statistical Machine Translation Gets Real: A Profile of Language Weaver