IBM Announces New Languages for Websphere Translation Server

SOMERS, NY -- IBM announced WebSphere Translation Server version 2.0, featuring new languages and linguistic improvements to existing languages. Most notably, WebSphere Translation Server now supports both Chinese- and Japanese-to-English translations, bringing the total number of supported language pairs to 16 and making IBM one of the first to successfully implement bi-directional English-Chinese translation commercially. The WebSphere Translation Server also supports translations from English to Brazilian Portuguese. In addition, new tools can make it simpler to customize dictionaries for more accurate translation. According to IBM, WebSphere Translation Server's machine translation technology can simplify communication across the enterprise. For instance, a Chinese language Web site or document can be translated into English and vice versa, with a click of a mouse - easing communication in companies that need to operate in both languages. "Today, human translation costs range anywhere from 20 to 40 cents per word. With frequent Web page updates, large volumes of content and the need for instant multilingual communications, costs add up fast," said Thomas Ritter, president of Amikai, an IBM Business Partner that builds translation solutions based on WebSphere Translation Server. "The accuracy, flexibility, and affordability inherent in WebSphere Translation Server 2.0 means that translation can be easily integrated within the right business applications and linguistically tailored to a customer's specific vocabulary." "As businesses work more and more across national boundaries, machine translation is helping ease communication and help companies succeed in today's global, multilingual economy," said William S. "Ozzie" Osborne, vice president of segment management, IBM Pervasive Computing. "With WebSphere Translation Server 2.0, we've included new functionality that makes it easy for customers to integrate machine translation for collaboration, enabling companies to operate in multiple languages more easily. Language can be a real barrier to customer communication - especially in Chinese and Japanese, which present distinctive challenges to translation because they can be more ambiguous and less specific than English. With WebSphere Translation Server, IBM is addressing the unique complexity of these languages and providing a time- and money-saving solution for translation needs." "IBM's entry into the market has helped to increase companies' interest in the use of machine translation, especially for real-time communication applications like email, instant messaging and chat," said Steve McClure, program vice president for collaboration, content and knowledge management, IDC. "With this latest release of the WebSphere Translation Server, IBM has improved an already comprehensive product suite by adding additional language pairs and platform support." WebSphere Translation Server 2.0 delivers both on-the-fly translation of static and dynamically-generated Web pages as well as translation using a servlet or JSP. The new version also offers dictionary management and provides open APIs for customized applications and for integration of additional language pairs from third-party providers. It runs on Windows NT, AIX, Solaris and Linux, supports Web servers IHS, Apache,IIS, iPlanet, and can translate HTML pages at up to 500 words per second. This version of the Translation Server also includes enhanced tools, the User Dictionary Manager, which allows users to create and customize dictionaries with company-specific terms, proper names and industry-specific phrases to improve translation quality. Users can access machine translation services for multilingual email and chat by integrating Lotus Domino and Sametime servers with WebSphere Translation Server via Lotus Translation Components and Lotus Translation Services for Sametime. Both are free and downloadable from the Lotus website.