Weekly news round-up prepared by the Editorial Staff of LangTechNews for LT-Innovate, the Forum for Europe’s Language Technology Industry.
Top of the Week: Google Translates Email, Zyncro Streams Bing
After six years of its free automated translation service, Google Translate not only announced some
statistics (200 million users globally) but a new application: Email translation. It seems surprising
that Google has waited so long to tackle email. After all Microsoft’s Bing already offered a plugin for
the Outlook email client back in 2009. Google probably noted that a growing number of users were
pasting email into the translation pane. Emails that need translating are also likely to be more
‘formal’ than the highly idiosyncratic language of most personal emails, hence easier to translate to
an acceptable level of quality. Ads can also be pegged to the local language of the end user if
translation is selected.
The Spanish company Zyncro, a developer of microblogging services for enterprises, has opted for
Bing Translate as a translation app for its professional collaboration environment. Clearly real-time
translation for all our everyday work and play content is becoming a natural developer reflex. But if
you are under 21 or so, you don’t use email but you may have an iPad; there’s a wealth of handy
language translation apps of varying degrees of sophistication continually popping out of the
woodwork.
Most Promising Start-ups: cXense, Syllabs and Synthesio all hit the headlines
A number of young European companies hit the beauty competition headlines last week. Synthesio,
a leading French e-reputation tracker, was chosen as one of the top nine listening platforms in a
Forrester Wave report. cXense, a Norwegian global technology company that provides SaaS
products for enterprises for online and mobile advertising, audience profiling, search, and analytics,
won a Top100 Europe award from Red Herring, the global innovation watch publisher, in a highly
competitive field. And French text-generation technology company Syllabs received media coverage
for the news that a number of French content producers are likely to roll out Syllabs’ automatic
editorial builder during the coming year.
