Michael S. Blekhman,
President, Lingvistica '98 Inc.
Machine Translation Products by LogoMedia
LogoMedia, a fast growing MT developer, based in Belmont, MA, USA, has
released a new product family: a family of machine translation systems for
PCs and ASP-based machine translation available through the web. The family
embraces the following direct translation language pairs: English to and
from French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Korean,
and Japanese. Some of the translation engines are based on the LogoMedia
proprietary English parser licensed from Language Engineering Company (LEC),
while some of them are licensed from other developers, such as the English
to German engine, based on the Barcelona technology, or English�Russian,
licensed from Lingvistica '98 Inc. (PARS English to and from Russian).
Each translation engine includes a basic dictionary and some additional
terminological ("technical" as the LogoMerdia developers name them)
dictionaries. For example, the English�German pair includes Business,
Computers, Legal, and Medical dictionaries.
Translation quality is rather high for a modern MT system, i.e. the
translations generated are certainly not ideal but quite useful. I know, for
example, that LogoMedia people are successfully using the English�German
translation engine to communicate with their German-speaking partners in
Germany.
A very interesting technological feature is the so-called Composite Engine.
This makes it possible for the user to have a text translated for those
language pairs for which no direct translation engine exists, such as
Spanish to French, or Italian to Korean. For example, if the user wants a
Portuguese text to be translated into ChineseKorean, LogoMedia successively
activates its 2 engines: first Portuguese to English, and then English to
Korean. There is no doubt that translating directly provides higher quality,
but, as they say, it's better (even much better!) than nothing.
LogoMedia direct and composite engines work in several modes, each of which
is very easy to use, even with minimum knowledge of MS Windows.
1. The simplest mode is translating words, and phrases, and sentences.
(TransIt)This is, in fact, a dictionary look-up program with Copy/Paste
options.
1.2. File translation is used for translating text and HTML files, in
particular, in the Drag-and-Drop mode: the user may drag a text selected in
his/her application and drop it onto the File Translation icon, after which
it will be automatically translated, and the resulting text will be
displayed in a Notepad window.
1.3. Text translation: a text can be translated and displayed in a typical
2-window editor.
1.4. Besides the above options, LogoMedia provides web-, text-, file, and
E-mail translation on the company's site: www.logomedia.net, both in the
direct and composite translation modes.
Next steps include the following products and features:
� adding English�Ukrainian and English�Polish direct translation engines;
� using the LogoMedia LEC parser for developing new translation engines, as
well as developing similar parsers for languages other than English;
� integrating all the translation engines with MS Word.
For skilled professional users, some of the LogoMedia engines include such
attractive features as translation memory archives and displaying variants
of translations for complete sentences and separate words.
Prices vary from $99 for a basic version of a European language pair (such
as English�Portuguese) and $199 for a similar Asian language pair, such as
English�Chinese, to $899 for the complete package including all the language
pairs and all the dictionaries.
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