PROMT

PROMT
Founded 1991 (1991)
Headquarters Saint Petersburg, Russia
Key people
 Svetlana Sokolova
Products Machine translation systems
Website www.promt.com
www.online-translator.com

PROMT (from PROject MT — the project of machine translation) is a Russian company focused upon the development of machine translation systems. At the moment PROMT translators exist for English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Russian languages. PROMT is headquartered in Saint Petersburg, Russia and also has offices in Moscow, Russia, San Francisco, the USA and Hamburg, Germany.[1] Except the system of machine translation PROMT also delivers its own solutions on the basis of the Translation memory technology.[2]

History

The company was founded in St.-Petersburg in 1991 by the former employees of laboratory of engineering linguistics of Herzen University. Svetlana Sokolova is the head of the company from its first day.[3]

On October 6, 1998 PROMT launches the first Russian web service Translate.ru, intended for translation of the text or a web pages.[4] It also has an English version Online-Translator http://www.online-translator.com.[5]

In 1997 PROMT together with the French company Softissimo develops a number of products for the western market called Reverso.[6]

In 2008 the company controlling stake has been redeemed by Renova Group. The sum of transaction is not disclosed, but according to Renova, the total amount of the world market of a translation service for the companies valued in 2007 at $9–10 billion, PROMT sales are 2% from this sum, that is $180–200 million. Hence by evaluations of one of observers of the market, who wanted to remain unnamed, cost of the packet acquired by "Renova" is no more than $20–40 million.[7]

Technology

PROMT translation is a rule-based machine translation (RBMT).[8] RBMT is a machine translation system based on linguistic information about source and target languages basically retrieved from (bilingual) dictionaries and grammars covering the main semantic, morphological, and syntactic regularities of each language respectively.[9] Having input sentences (in some source language), an RBMT system generates them to output sentences (in some target language) on the basis of morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis of both the source and the target languages involved in a concrete translation task.

At the end of 2010 of PROMT provided the Hybrid technology of translation leverages the strengths of Statistical machine translation and rule-based translation methodologies.[10] The approaches differ in a number of ways:

Rules post-processed by statistics: Translations are performed using a rules based engine. Statistics are then used in an attempt to adjust/correct the output from the rules engine.

Statistics guided by rules: Rules are used to pre-process data in an attempt to better guide the statistical engine. Rules are also used to post-process the statistical output to perform functions such as normalization. This approach has a lot more power, flexibility and control when translating.

Online-translator.com

Online-translator.com is an English version of the web-service, intended for translation of texts and web pages. It was launched by PROMT on the 6th of March, 1998.[11] Every day Online-Translator.com provides translation to 70.000 people.[12] Online-translator.com uses PROMT technology[13] and provides rule-based machine translation[14] unlike Google Translator, which uses statistical machine translation.[15]

See also

References

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