- SYSTRAN
SYSTRAN, founded by Dr.
Peter Toma in1968 [Systran: Past and Present - http://pages.unibas.ch/LIlab/staff/tenhacken/Applied-CL/3_Systran/3_Systran.html#history] , is one of the oldestmachine translation companies. SYSTRAN has done extensive work for theUnited States Department of Defense and theEuropean Commission .SYSTRAN provides the technology for
Yahoo! andAltaVista 's (Babel Fish) among others, but use of it was ended (circa 2007) for all of the language combinations offered byGoogle 's language tools [Google Switches to Its Own Language System, "Google Operating System", October 2007] .SYSTRAN is used by the Dashboard Translation widget in Mac OS X.
Commercial versions of SYSTRAN operate with operating systems
Microsoft Windows (includingWindows Mobile ),Linux and Solaris.History
With its origin in the Georgetown machine translation effort, SYSTRAN was one of the few machine translation systems to survive the major decrease of funding after the ALPAC Report of the mid-1960's. The company was established in La Jolla,
California to work on translation of Russian to English text for theUnited States Air Force during 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) atWright-Patterson Air Force Base , Ohio. The quality of the translations, although only approximate, was usually adequate for understanding content.The company was sold during 1986 to the Gachot family, based in
Paris ,France , and is now traded publicly by the French stock exchange. It has a main office at theGrande Arche inLa Defense and maintains a secondary office inLa 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 theApollo-Soyuz project
* English source (1975) for theEuropean Commission
* Arabic
* Chinese
* Danish
* Dutch
* French
* German
* Greek
* Hindi
* Italian
* Japanese
* Korean
* Norwegian
* Serbo-Croatian
* Spanish
* Swedish
* Persian
* Polish
* Portuguese
* Ukrainian
* Urduee also
*
Comparison of Machine translation applications External links
* [http://www.systransoft.com/PastPresent.html SYSTRAN website]
References
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