It was announced today that Worldlingo (www.worldlingo.com) is going to integrate the Language Weaver machine translation system on their Internet site and in their desktop translation products. See the full post on http://tinyurl.com/qf4atf
Worldlingo is the leader in a market niche that it itself created: Internet Translation. The Australian company came into prominence at the start of the 2000’s by offering free translation of websites. This solution was deployed by thousands of websites, with each website providing a text link to Worldlingo’s home page. As a result, Worldlingo came in at the top of virtually every keyword search involving translation. Worldlingo was the first translation company to rely exclusively on the Internet for marketing and sales.
In another brilliant move, Worldlingo paid Microsoft a sum of several hundred thousand Dollars (which MS gladly pocketed) to integrate Worldlingo’s translation services in MS Office products.
With the huge following that resulted, Worldlingo started to sell translation solutions for Website translation, translation of emails and other applications.
All of Worldlingo’s translation solutions were powered by Systran Enterprise Server 5.0.
Recently, Worldlingo has seen a steep drop in Internet traffic on their website — 25% in the last 3 months and over 50% in the last 2 years (see http://alexa.com/siteinfo/worldlingo.com). That has got to hurt as the Internet is their bread-and-butter. Worldlingo’s solutions have become outdated. The Systran 5.0 server they are running is a few years old. People are not really buying desktop translation products any more. And Google offers many of Worldlingo’s solutions for free, which makes it very tough for Worldlingo to make money from sales. The future of the partnership with Microsoft is unclear. Microsoft has its own machine translation technology which they are integrating into MS Office products.
By integrating one of the best machine translation systems available (Language Weavers Statistical MT system), Worldlingo hopes to regain some of its prominence by rejuvenating its product and service offering with new languages and enhanced translation quality.
Worldlingo is the brainchild of Australian entrepreneur Phil Scanlan, who is probably still the owner but no longer the CEO of Worldlingo. Mr. Scanlan is currently running RxWorks – Veterinary Practice Management Software.
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