Transclick is a mobile enterprise application that
translates text in email, SMS and IM. The software has been around for a while (see
this CNNMoney.com article from March 2005), but is now starting to make waves as a
business productivity tool. RIM Blackberry just announced Transclick as the winner of its
BlackBerry
Developer Productivity Tools Challenge and they were a runner-up
in the Skype Developer Contest recently.
For the Blackberry version of Transclick, the translation tool that can be applied to any outgoing email or SMS message from the BlackBerry device and caters to 15 languages.
Transclick is obviously handy for translating emails and SMS on the fly. Possible use cases are: you work for a multinational company and have frequent communication across borders; or you are a member of a startup that outsources work to other countries (very common in the web industry now).
They claim to have 150 dictionaries in English to/from 16 languages - which CEO Robert Levin
told me "makes our translation of SMS, email and IM more accurate than text translated on
Babelfish, which is not integrated seamlessly with SMS, email and IM." In terms of their
business model, Levin told me it is subscriptions ($3 to $15 per month per user) and
licensing ($150,000 to $500,000 for a server farm) - "including 32 language directions,
load balancing on a carrier grade system and access to 150 vertical market dictionaries
for higher accuracy."
Transclick is also able to be customized so that it translates technical or business terms. In fact they have patents around this technology. Levin told me via email:
"We have a patent for adding customized dictionaries that are context-sensitive and produce superior translation to free translation services online. There is a lot of demand for this: free translation services already translate 300 million texts with 3 billion words per month and Transclick is uniquely positioned with a patent, seasoned management and major partners (RIM, Skype, Qualcomm and several large carriers) to execute on a for-profit business model. We are getting traction now with large wireless carriers who want to share revenue with us as they globalize their collaboration services."
One example of Transclick integrating with a Web app is its use as a Skype add-on, as described a few months ago on the eBay Developers Program blog:
"It's an app that plugs into Skype Chat and provides real time translation between a dozen different languages. There's also a glossary function that lets you look up less common technical terms--useful for getting into deep discussions about your eBay category, or your specific area of technology. A Skype Voice plug-in is not available yet, but the patents are in place, and it's only a matter of time."
Robert Levin told me they have had over 6,000 downloads from the Skype Extras Gallery and they're in the process of certifying their application to place it on the Skype toolbar. As for other partnerships, apart from the obvious carriers business, they're negotiating with Sony to enter into a Strategic Alliance and they have deals with Yahoo enterprise IM and Googletalk.
As noted in a Forbes article from a year ago, Transclick does not currently handle voice-to-voice translation. However the problem is being worked on, as Robert Levin told Forbes last year:
"But Levin says the first systems, developed for "dirty travel survival," like using the cell phone to give cab drivers directions in Chinese, will be ready within two years. Levin is currently working on voice-to-text translations that will allow tourists to speak a question into their cell phones. Translated Chinese text will then appear on the cell screen for another person to read. True speech-to-speech translation, albeit with limited vocabulary, will be ready by the end of the decade."
In summary, this is the kind of technology that I love to cover on Read/WriteWeb - truly innovative and trying to solve a large real-world problem. Transclick also has a cool developers program and a range of subscription products. It's an international company, with a team of 14 developers in Bulgaria at Transclick Labs and sales teams across the world (their US sales team is based in Chicago).
Transclick is a company to watch out for and I'm interested in seeing how close they get to doing voice-to-voice translations. That would be a huge breakthrough, for whoever solves it first!
Comments
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I wonder what machine translation engine they use, probably Systran but there's no mention about it. I don't think they have their own MT technology but they're interfacing existing ones.
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | October 25, 2006 10:42 PM
Online translation tools, as pointed out in a recent BBC article, can be a risky business. A debate in the European Parliament, during which the French sentence «Nous avons besoin de la sagesse normande» was simultaneously-translated as "We need Norman Wisdom"...(dont know if that means anything to anyone outside the U.K.)
Posted by: A.Robson | October 26, 2006 9:28 AM
ps: or anyone, for that matter, who is old enough to remember the English comic Norman Wisdom.
Or then there is the old favourite - "Voici l'anglais avec son sangfroid habituel" became "Here's the Englishman with his usual bloody cold"
Even the most subtle computer program doesn't think - and you need to be able to think in order to translate correctly (for the moment at least).
Very interesting article about an interesting subject, as they often are,thankyou.
Posted by: A.Robson | October 26, 2006 9:46 AM
Hi, I am the founder of Transclick. To answer your question, we do not use Systran's MT technology. We use a best-of-breed aggregation from over 10 different vendors, many of which have MT engines that are superior to Systran. Most of Transclick's technology is about connecting the best engines to communication devices to make it easy to communicate across language borders with customized dictionaries. Free translation quality does not use specialized subject domain specific dictionaries and thats why the free MT quality has terrible quality in general. If you try to translate the word "bit", the MT engine itself can not distinguish between a drilling bit or a computer bit or a horse bridle bit. But once you use the right dictionary, say an oil & gas dictionary, or a computer science dictionary, or an equestrian dictionary, the engine draws from the right dictionary to produce a context-sensitive correct translation, something the free translation services just don't do. Also, human translators make mistakes and can't possibly memorize more than 20,000 words....we have over 10 million words under management. Human translators are slow--no more than 1,600 words translated per day...Transclick translates 1,600 words in 2 seconds. Human translators are expensive, up to $200 per page; Transclick is $5 per month for hundreds of emails and Instant Messages, which human translators can not afford to do so cheaply and can not compete on price, time or accuracy for 150 different topic domaines that Transclick offers. So while Transclick can not translate nuanced poetry correctly, we can add idiomatic expressions, slang, and jargon to your very own dictionary and host it for you, just like you add words to a spell checker dictionary. Like a spell checker, this is not magic, its a communications tool--and not one every throws their spell checker away because it does not have all the words you need---you simply click "ADD" and customize your own dictionary for the words you need that are appropriate to your own documents and context. So can we for multlingual communications. There are over 1 billion people who communicate in broken English every day with 50% to 90% accuracy. Transclick is better than that--which means we can add another 1 billion people to the global conversation! Online translation tools do not have context senstive, customizable dictionaries--Transclick does. I just translated " Nous avons besoin de la sagesse des ordinateurs linguistiques" into " We need the wisdom of the linguistic computers". The language barrier has been broken. And that does not mean 100% accurate translation--it means conversational quality that will add 1 billion people using Skype, Mobile phones and Instant messengers to the global conversation, and by automating context recognition, we will add slang, terminology and jargon that is appropriate...if its not in our 150 dictionaries, we will add it to the data base. If it was easy, every free translation service would do what Transclick are doing. There is a reason why Transclick is won 9 awards for innovation.
Posted by: Robert Levin | October 26, 2006 8:06 PM
Here are the latest FACTS by NIST:
http://www.nist.gov/speech/tests/mt/mt05eval_official_results_release_20050801_v3.html
Posted by: ZOverLord | October 27, 2006 6:16 AM
@ Robert Levin, I am seriously impressed with what I've been reading about Transclick. You do seem to be in another league from Systran and others of the same ilk. Many professional linguists have always said that translation is a sack of knots that no software will ever get to the bottom of. But then as you point out in your comments above, not everyone needs to get right to the bottom of a sack of knots to get the shopping done. With the help of your company & those like yours there can only be less misunderstanding in the world. I sincerely wish you more power to your elbow as we say up north. A nod as well to ZOverlord for an interesting link.
Posted by: A.Robson | October 27, 2006 12:50 PM