WinterGreen Translation Companies and Services
May 29, 2013
We came across a 4,600 word news release about the language translation software market. The study has more than 400 pages and covers a wide range of topics, including mobile phone translation systems. We worked on the Topeka Capital Markets’ Google voice report. We are biased because Google seems to have a significant technology and resource edge. As we worked through the news release we did see a list of the firms which WinterGreen discusses.
A notable translation helper, the Rosetta Stone. A happy quack to the British Museum at www.britishmuseum.org.
I want to snag the list because it had some surprises as well as both familiar and unfamiliar firms in the inventory. Here’s what I noticed in the news release:
ABBYY Lingvo (http://www.lingvo-online.ru/en)
Alchemy CATALYST (http://www.alchemysoftware.com/)
AppTek HMT (now a unit of SAIC. http://www.saic.com)
Babylon (free)
Bitext (www.bitext.com)
CallMiner (http://www.callminer.com/)
Cloudwords (http://www.cloudwords.com/)
Cognition Technologies (www.cognition.com)
Duolingo (more of a learning system. http://duolingo.com/)
Google (ah, the GOOG)
Hewlett Packard (maybe www.autonomy.com)
IBM WebSphere Translation Server (try http://goo.gl/hGS2R)
Kilgray Translation Technologies (http://kilgray.com/)
KudoZ (http://www.proz.com/kudoz/)
Language Engineering (http://www.lec.com)
Language Weaver (Now part of SDL. See http://goo.gl/IH3mg)
Lingo24 (An agency. See http://www.lingo24.com/)
Lingotek (http://www.lingotek.com/)
Lionbridge (crowdsourcing and integrator at http://www.lionbridge.com/)
MT@EC (http://ec.europa.eu/isa/actions/02-interoperability-architecture/2-8action_en.htm)
Mission Essential Personnel (humans for rent at http://www.lionbridge.com/)
Moravia (http://www.moravia.com/)
MultiCorpora (http://www.multicorpora.com/en/products/)
Nuance (http://www.nuance.com)
OpenAmplify (http://www.openamplify.com/)
Plunet BusinessManager (A management system at http://www.plunet.com/us/)
Proz.com (humans for rent at http://www.proz.com)
RWS Legal Translation (http://www.rws.com/EN/)
Reverso (Free. See http://www.reverso.net/text_translation.aspx?lang=EN)
SDL Trados (Part of SDL. See http://www.trados.com/en/)
Sail Labs (http://www.sail-labs.com/)
Softissimo (Services and software. http://www.softissimo.com/softissimo.asp?lang=IT)
Symbio Software (http://www.symbio.com/)
Systran (http://www.systransoft.com/)
Translations.com (Services and software. http://www.translations.com/)
Translators without Borders (Humans for rent. http://translatorswithoutborders.org/)
Veveo (More semantics than translation. http://corporate.veveo.net/)
Vignette (Open Text. http://www.opentext.com)
Word Magic Technology (I could not locate.)
WorldLingo (Rent a human. http://goo.gl/dhiu)
Of these 30 or so companies, there were some which struck me a surprise. Hewlett Packard, for example, owns Autonomy. I suppose that other units of Hewlett Packard have translation capabilities, but were these licensed or home grown? Also, the inclusion of Vignette is interesting. I must admit that I don’t hear much about Vignette as a translation system. The list makes translation look robust. The key players boil down to a handful of companies. I did not spot firms in the translation services or software business in China, India, Japan, or Russia, but I may have missed these firms in the WinterGreen news release describing the report.
If you want to buy a copy of the report, which I assume has paragraphs unlike the news release, point your browser at http://goo.gl/97e2s and have your credit card ready. The report is about US$7,500.
Stephen E Arnold, May 29, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
Bitext Delivers a Breakthrough in Localized Sentiment Analysis
May 29, 2013
Identifying user sentiment has become one of the most powerful analytic tools provided by text processing companies, and Bitext’s integrative software approach is making sentiment analysis available to companies seeking to capitalize on its benefits while avoiding burdensome implementation costs. A few years ago, Lexalytics merged with Infonics. Since that time, Lexalytics has been marketing aggressively to position the company as one of the leaders in sentiment analysis. Exalead also offered sentiment analysis functionality several years ago. I recall a demonstration which generated a report about a restaurant which provided information about how those writing reviews of a restaurant expressed their satisfaction.
Today vendors of enterprise search systems have added “sentiment analysis” as one of the features of their systems. The phrase “sentiment analysis” usually appears cheek-by-jowl with “customer relationship management,” “predictive analytics,” and “business intelligence.” My view is that the early text analysis vendors such as Trec participants in the early 2000’s recognized that key word indexing was not useful for certain types of information retrieval tasks. Go back and look at the suggestions for the benefit of sentiment functions within natural language processing, and you will see that the idea is a good one but it has taken a decade or more to become a buzzword. (See for example, Y. Wilks and M. Stevenson, “The Grammar of Sense: Using Part-of-Speech Tags as a First Step in Semantic Disambiguation, Journal of Natural Language Engineering,1998, Number 4, pages 135–144.)
One of the hurdles to sentiment analysis has been the need to add yet another complex function which has a significant computational cost to existing systems. In an uncertain economic environment, additional expenses are looked at with scrutiny. Not surprisingly, organizations which understand the value of sentiment analysis and want to be in step with the data implications of the shift to mobile devices want a solution which works well and is affordable.
Fortunately Bitext has stepped forward with a semantic analysis program that focuses on complementing and enriching systems, rather than replacing them. This is bad news for some of the traditional text analysis vendors and for enterprise search vendors whose programs often require a complete overhaul or replacement of existing enterprise applications.
I recently saw a demonstration of Bitext’s local sentiment system that highlights some of the integrative features of the application. The demonstration walked me through an online service which delivered an opinion and sentiment snap in, together with topic categorization. The “snap in” or cloud based approach eliminates much of the resource burden imposed by other companies’ approaches, and this information can be easily integrated with any local app or review site.
The Bitext system, however, goes beyond what I call basic sentiment. The company’s approach processes contents from user generated reviews as well as more traditional data such as information in a CRM solution or a database of agent notes, as they do with the Salesforce marketing cloud. One important step forward for Bitext’s system is its inclusion of trends analysis. Another is its “local sentiment” function, coupled with categorization. Local sentiment means that when I am in a city looking for a restaurant, I can display the locations and consumers’ assessments of nearby dining establishments. While a standard review consists of 10 or 20 lines of texts and an overall star scoring, Bitext can add to that precisely which topics are touched in the review and with associated sentiments. For a simple review like, “the food was excellent but the service was not that good”, Bitext will return two topics and two valuations: food, positive +3; service, negative -1).
A tap displays a detailed list of opinions, positive and negative. This list is automatically generated on the fly. The Bitext addition includes a “local sentiment score” for each restaurant identified on the map. The screenshot below shows how location-based data and publicly accessible reviews are presented.
Bitext’s system can be used to provide deep insight into consumer opinions and developing trends over a range of consumer activities. The system can aggregate ratings and complex opinions on shopping experiences, events, restaurants, or any other local issue. Bitext’s system can enrich reviews from such sources as Yelp, TripAdvisor, Epinions, and others in a multilingual environment
Bitext boasts social media savvy. The system can process content from Twitter, Google+ Local, FourSquare, Bing Maps, and Yahoo! Local, among others, and easily integrates with any of these applications.
The system can also rate products, customer service representatives, and other organizational concerns. Data processed by the Bitext system includes enterprise data sources, such as contact center transcripts or customer surveys, as well as web content.
In my view, the Bitext approach goes well beyond the three stars or two dollar signs approach of some systems. Bitext can evaluate topics or “aspects”. The system can generate opinions for each topic or facet in the content stream. Furthermore, Bitext’s use of natural language provides qualitative information and insight about each topic revealing a more accurate understanding of specific consumer needs that purely quantitative rating systems lacks. Unlike other systems I have reviewed, Bitext presents an easy to understand and easy to use way to get a sense of what users really have to say, and in multiple languages, not just English!
For those interested in analytics, the Bitext system can identify trending “places” and topics with a click.
Stephen E Arnold, May 29, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
Connotate: Private Company Toot Toot
April 29, 2013
I read “Connotate Announces Record Quarter, Driven by Market Demand for More Rapid Delivery of Web Content-Based Products and Services.” The main point is that Connotate is growing revenues and that growth is a result of “market demand.”
Market demand means, according to wise Geek means:
the total amount of purchases of a product or family of products within a specified demographic. The demographic may be based on factors such as age or gender, or involve the total amount of sales that are generated in a particular geographic location.
I learned:
The market for the Connotate solution is broadening as the cost of deployment continues to decrease. “We’ve mastered the entire workflow stack from manual processes all the way to high-end automation,” said Mulholland. “This has resulted in significant growth for us in the SMB market, while we continue to increase the value that our large enterprise customers are receiving. For example, a major UK-based job board publisher was tasked with achieving a 40 percent increase in the number of listings in a very short period of time. Connotate’s automated solution is helping them meet this aggressive goal.”
Does this mean that other companies in Connotate’s competitive sphere will experience similar upsides? The anecdotal information available to me suggests that some of the companies competing directly with Connotate are having trouble closing commercial deals which generate a profit for the vendor. Examples range from specialists in pure analytics, providers of business information visualization systems, and metatagging outfits.
My hunch is that if Connotate is experiencing the financial gains attributed to this privately held company, other factors must be in play. What are those factors? Why are so many of Connotate’s competitors struggling to hit their numbers? Why are some investors slowing down their commitment to back some of Connotate’s rivals?
Perhaps market demand does not float the boats in this particular body of water? Worth monitoring the actions of big name investors with a fondness for this sector like Silver Lake, some of the companies which continue to receive injections of cash in the hops of hitting the big time, and the peregrinations of executives who jump from one content processing outfit to another.
I am assuming that the financial data referenced in the write up are accurate.
Stephen E Arnold, April 29, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
Attensity: Evolving and Repositioning Again
April 29, 2013
I met David Bean years ago. He was explaining “deep extraction” to me at a now defunct search engine conference. I recall that he had a number of US government clients. I noted in my analysis of the company which appeared in my analysis of the company that the firm wanted to break into non government markets.
I made sure that one of my team captured news releases about Attensity. When I checked the my files to update my Attensity profile, I noted that the company had done a merger with a couple of German outfits, was pushing into sentiment analysis, and beating the text analytics drum.
In one sense, Attensity was following the same path of Stratify, which as you probably know was Purple Yogi. Hewlett Packard now owns Stratify and I don’t hear too much about how its journey from government work to the wide world of non government work has worked out. Purple Yogi, now Hewlett Packard Autonomy, Stratify is doing legal stuff … I think. If I understand the write up by a high intellect consultant expert, Attensity is speedboating into customer support.
Can market niches like customer support, eDiscovery, and business intelligence keep some vendors afloat?
Two different markets but one common goal: Diversify in order to generate big revenues.
I read “Attensity Uses Social Media Technology for Smarter Customer Engagement.” On the surface, the story is a good one and it is earnestly told:
Its product Respond uses natural language-based analysis to derive insights from any form of text-based data and among other results can produce analyses of customer sentiment, hot issues, trends and key metrics. The product supports what Attensity calls LARA – listen, analyze, relate, act – which is a form of closed-loop performance management. It begins by extracting data from multiple sources of text-based data, (listening), analyzing the content of the data (analyze), linking this data with other sources of customer data, and producing alerts, workflows and reports to encourage action to be taken based on the insights (act).
Familiar stuff. Text processing, outputs, and payoffs for the licensees.
Attensity, founded in 2000, that’s 13 years ago, is no spring chicken. I learned from the write up:
Attensity has also made some technical improvements to the product. The architecture now supports multitenancy and automatic load balancing, which are especially useful in handling very large volumes of tweets. Reporting has been enhanced to include more visualization options, trend analysis, emerging hot issues, and process and performance analysis.
My thought is that many firms which flourished with the once generous assistance of the US government now have to find a way to generate top line revenue, sustainable growth, and profits.
In the present financial environment, text processing companies are flocking to specific problem areas in organizations. Customer support (a bit of an oxymoron in my opinion), eDiscovery, and business intelligence (not as amusing as military intelligence in my opinion) now are well served sectors.
The companies looking for software and systems to make sense of data, cut costs, gain a competitive advantage, or some other benefit much favored by MBAs have not found a magic carpet ride.
The noise from vendors is increasing. The time required to find and close a deal is increasing. Some customers are looking high and low for a solution which is “good enough”. Management turnover, frequent repositionings, and familiar marketing lingo by themselves may not be enough to keep the many firms competing in these “hot niches” afloat.
Stephen E Arnold, April 29, 2013
Tougher Times for Cash Hungry Content Processing Vendors?
April 18, 2013
I read the troubling write up “Q1 Venture Capital Spending And Number Of Deals Down, M&A Activity Drops 44 Percent And Pre-Money Valuations Plummet”. Try as I might, I could not see much good news in the data presented.
The main point of the write up was in my opinion:
Deals in Information Technology (IT), Healthcare, Energy and Utilities, and Industrial Goods all declined, and deals in Business and Financial Services, Consumer Goods, and Consumer Services investment increased from the previous quarter.
For companies in the search, content processing, and analytics sector with a consumer angle, the good news is that money may continue to flow and may, in some cases, spike.
For other types of outfits, money may become more difficult to get. If a funding source is available, my hunch is that investors may be taking increasingly critical looks at the companies ingesting money. How does one age a Type A 35 year old senior manager? My thought is, “Ask for actions that deliver revenue, not marketing puffery.” I am probably off base, but the Techcrunch story suggests that a downward trend may be upon us.
One cannot forget that the investors’ expectation is a return. For companies in the old “search” space, revenues are going to be needed to avoid one of those legendary investor actions: Top management replacement, fire sale, forced merger, intellectual property auction, shut down, or some similar step.
Going forward, search, content processing, and analytics vendors are going to have to generate more revenue. In short, the squeezable days of the last three years may be going away.
Can the search, content processing, and analytics vendors which have taken sums ranging from a few million (BA Insight, Digital Reasoning) to tens of millions (Attivio, Coveo) to hundreds of millions (Palantir) deliver significant top line growth and demonstrate a here-and-now value proposition? One or more of these companies will definitely perform. The ones which do not? Well, that’s what makes search and content processing so darned interesting.
One of my financial clients has asked me to poke around with some numbers and market appetite. No results in hand yet. The project is interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, April 18, 2013
Sponsored by HighGainBlog
Chiliad and Virtual Consolidation
April 13, 2013
Yep, fragmentation is an issue even in big data analytics. I read “Chiliad Takes Virtual Consolidation Route to Big Data Analytics.” Chiliad is a company which provides software and services to a number of US government agencies and to other customers as well.
The main point of the write up is:
Chiliad says it can eliminate some of those barriers to adoption of big data analytics with Discovery/Alert 7.0, an iterative information retrieval system that lets analysts search any data warehouse or data set across clouds, agencies, departments and organizations.
The once popular term “federation” has given way to a host of synonyms, including unified information access and consolidation. The new twist is the use of the word “virtual” which implies that leaving data where it resides is something new. The alternative is creating a data warehouse like the old iPhrase system and other repository centric approaches to data management.
The article contains this statement: “Discovery/Alert provides global ranking of results to help analysts find relevant information in massive collections of data.” Then I read, “We [Chiliad] actually give you a unified, holistic global ranking of all of your results… As organizations scale out to billions of records and petabytes of data, relevancy becomes more important.”
The story highlights features which remind me of Fast Search & Transfer’s descriptions of its system. In fact, a number of search and content processing vendors have made similar points for many years.
What’s new? The emphasis is on “all” and “virtual.” Will these concepts be enough to move search and content processing, analytics, and business intelligence forward? Will these assertions cause some firms to dog paddle instead of speeding to the finish line?
I don’t know. The marketing points seem remarkable consistent in my opinion. The problems seem to be unsolved despite the efforts of many, many vendors to deliver actionable information.
Stephen E Arnold, April 13, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky.com, the new ArnoldIT portal
Sinequa Lands Eurocopter
April 11, 2013
Sinequa announced that is was selected by Eurocopter, an EADS subsidiary, to improve access to enterprise data and thus increase performance and satisfaction of its employees.
Sinequa is one of the leaders in enterprise search and unified information access, including the emerging big data market. The firm, based in Paris, provides large enterprises and administrations with the means to tame the complexity of their structured and unstructured data and to extract value from large volumes of very heterogeneous data.
Eurocopter was looking for a solution that could meet all its different professional needs in the context of accessing relevant information, rather than creating a specific solution for each profession.
After a proof of concept, Sinequa won the contract competing against a number of big players in the search market. The Sinequa replaced Eurocopter’s existing solution provided by a vendor recently acquired by a large conglomerate.
Eurocopter embraced Sinequa’s “grid architecture” because the approach provides effective scaling. Eurocopter has implemented a five-node Sinequa Grid distributed across the sites at Marignane (Grance), Donauwörth (Germany), and La Courneuve (France). This architecture can easily be extended to subsidiaries in America and Asia.
At this time, two business solutions are in operation. The first is access to technical data for a group of about 800 technical experts. The second provides access to the information on the Eurocopter Intranet. The system supports approximately 15.000 employees of the group working from locations throughout the world.
The Eurocopter professionals working in technical support require relevant information not only in technical data and documentation contained in such systems as Filenet and in operating systems’ file systems and emails. The unified information access offered by the Sinequa platform these Eurocopter professionals assemble the relevant information pertaining to a client case in one structured space. The content in the Sinequa “space” is easily navigated and accessed. In addition, the system provides access to the image bank of helicopters covers four languages: French, German, Spanish, and English. The unified access to data on the Intranet is simpler and offers a new navigation based on search.
Sinequa’s linguistic capabilities help analyze users’ requests as well as the contents of documents. Sinequa’s linguistic methods optimize the relevance of information delivered and, thus, reduce search time to a minimum. Filters and a taxonomy specific to Eurocopter’s activity are used to facilitate the extraction of technical terms from content processed by the Sinequa system.
Due to a high performance generalized search, each and every employee can now find, in real time, the specific information they need for their work images, rules and regulations, agreements, procedures, reports, and forms).
In coming months, Eurocopter plans to extending the usage of Sinequa’s unified information access to other business applications, including
the indexation of further applications, such as product lifecycle management and customer relationship management.
Stephen E Arnold, April 11, 2013
Sponsored by HighGain
Has the Web Become a Dead End?
April 3, 2013
I have been less and less enchanted with the Web as a mechanism for years. Good luck with some of the cloud computing services. Good luck with some of the hosted big data processing services. Good luck with hosted search.
Latency is often my companion.
I read “Our Regressive Web” and learned:
An entrepreneur friend of mine remarked to me recently that if someone invented the nightly news today—or a show like Brian Williams’ “Rock Center”—we’d all think it was a great idea. Think about it: Instead of having to follow all these different news sources, you could just tune in, get a digest of all the important stuff that happened, and you could trust that it had been verified, that it was balanced and high-quality, and would all be well-produced. It struck me, as I tried to wrap my head around the demise of Google Reader and Google’s inexplicable de-emphasis of Google Alerts, how both those ideas—Reader and Alerts—fit the same criteria.
The end of a push service is no big deal. I survived the death of PointCast and Backweb. I even worked through the shift from Desktop Data’s push to an alert type service which was free and less hostile to my in box.
But finding information is getting harder in my opinion. This passage resonated with me:
Yet here we sit, both of those awesome services essentially shuttered in the last year, primed for the scrap heap of Internet history. Then there’s Delicious—a similar idea that allows you to organize your links by categories and see what other people thought were valuable—which has not been shut down, per se, just slowly maimed beyond recognition, its loyal users driven away. And for what reason? Nothing better has risen up to replace them. The underlying needs of a fairly large user base (that these services meet) still exist. We’re just regressing. It’s the one thing I find most disheartening and perhaps most frustrating about this trend. It’s something that needs to be heard, particularly by the people who wrote off these services as Web 1.0 or Web 2.0 relics—the type who said, “Well, nobody used RSS, so good riddance.” The collapse of these services, to me, represents an alarming reduction of key services designed to improve online information from the user’s perspective.
Regressing? I don’t think the word is strong enough. The Web for many applications is almost unusable. Disagree? Use the comments section of the blog and feel free to insert links to unusable search and content processing services. Azure chip consultants need not participate.
Stephen E Arnold, April 3, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
New Tool Integrates with Text Analytics
March 21, 2013
Language and analytics are starting a new trend by coming together. According to the Destination CRM.com article “New SDL Machine Translation Tool Integrates with Text Analytics” SDL has announced that its machine translation tool can now be integrated to work with text analytics solutions. SDL BeGlobal can translate both structured and unstructured information across more than 80 different language combinations. The information is then analyzed using text analytics solutions. This gives users the ability to access global customer insights as well as important business trends. Jean-Francois Damais, Deputy Managing Director of loyalty global clients solutions at Ispos had the following to say regarding SDL BeGlobal.
“With the growth in global business and the accessibility of online information, we now have a much greater need to access and analyze data from multiple languages. As a company focused on innovation and dedicated to our clients’ successes, we deployed SDL BeGlobal machine translation to further improve our research insights and bring new value to our customers.”
SDL BeGlobal has already caught on with several companies in the text analytics industry and several well known companies have jumped on the bandwagon. Raytheon BBN Technologies currently uses the technology for broadcast and Web content monitoring and Expert Systems uses it for semantic intelligence. Language and analytics are two things that are not normally thought of together but seems like SDL BeGlobal has a good thing going. Only time will tell if the new friendship between language and analytics will last the test of time.
April Holmes, March 21, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Semantria Adds Value to Unstructured Data With Sentiment Analysis
March 19, 2013
We are constantly on the lookout for movers and shakers in the area of text analysis and sentiment analysis. So, I was intrigued when I came across Semantria’s Web site recently, a company claiming text and sentiment analysis is made fast and easy with their software. With claims to simplify costs and high-value capturing, I had to research further.
The company was founded in 2011 as a software-as-a-service and services company, specializing in cloud-based text and sentiment analysis.The team boasts a foundation from text analytics provider Lexalytics, software development Postindustria, and demand generation consultancy DemandGen.
The company page shares about how its software can give insight into unstructured content:
“Semantria’s API helps organizations to extract meaning from large amounts of unstructured text. The value of the content can only be accessed if you see the trends and sentiments that are hidden within. Add sophisticated text analytics and sentiment analysis to your application: turn your unstructured content into actionable data.”
Semantria API is powered by the Lexalytics Salience 5 analytics engine and is fully REST compliant. A processing demo is available at at https://semantria.com/demo. We think it is well worth a look.
Andrea Hayden, March 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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