Language Weaver

Language Weaver is the machine translation (MT) technology and brand of RWS. The brand name was revived in 2021 following the acquisition SDL[1] and Iconic Translation Machines Ltd.[2] and the merging of the respective teams and technologies. Language Weaver was formerly a standalone company that was acquired by SDL in 2010.

Language Weaver
Type of site
Neural machine translation
Available in58 languages and language varieties
OwnerRWS
URLwww.rws.com/language-weaver/
CommercialYes
RegistrationYes
Launched2002 (2002)
Current statusActive

History

Language Weaver was a Los Angeles, California–based company founded in 2002 as a spin-out company from the University of Southern California. The company was founded to commercialise a statistical approach to automatic language translation and natural language processing known as statistical machine translation (SMT). The company's name is a reference to one of the pioneers of machine translation — Warren Weaver — who first proposed the idea of using computers to ‘decode’ or ‘decrypt’ language in a memorandum back in 1947.

Language Weaver’s statistical approach to machine translation was cutting-edge at the time, and a significant improvement over previous approaches such as Rule-Based MT. Language Weaver grew a steadily over an 8 year period, with staff numbers totalling 96 across offices in US, Europe, and Japan. The company had significant business with Government organisations where its name continues to hold strong recognition to this day.

In July 2010, Language Weaver was acquired by SDL plc for $42.5 million and the company was renamed SDL Language Weaver.[3]

SDL Language Weaver

SDL Language Weaver was the primary machine translation technology at SDL where, over time, it evolved from SMT to syntax-based MT, to Neural Machine Translation. The Language Weaver brand was retired in 2015 in favour of SDL BeGlobal for the cloud-based solution, and SDL Enterprise Translation Server for the on-premise solution. Later, these products were rebranded again as SDL Machine Translation Cloud and SDL Machine Translation Edge respectively.

2021 Relaunch

The Language Weaver brand was revived in 2021 following the acquisition of SDL by RWS, and the merger of the SDL MT and Iconic Translation Machines teams and technologies. The combined technologies of both companies, based on state-of-the-art Transformer-based Neural Machine Translation, are now sold as "Language Weaver" for cloud-based MT, and "Language Weaver Edge" for on-premise MT.

Supported languages

As of September 2021, Language Weaver supports the following languages and language varieties:[4]

  1. Albanian
  2. Arabic
  3. Armenian
  4. Bengali
  5. Bulgarian
  6. Burmese
  7. Catalan
  8. Chinese (Simplified)
  9. Chinese (Traditional)
  10. Croatian
  11. Czech
  12. Danish
  13. Dari
  14. Dutch
  15. English
  16. Estonian
  17. Finnish
  18. French
  19. French (Canada)
  20. Georgian
  21. German
  22. Greek
  23. Hausa
  24. Hebrew
  25. Hindi
  26. Hungarian
  27. Indonesian
  28. Italian
  29. Japanese
  30. Javanese
  31. Khmer
  32. Korean
  33. Kurdish (Kurmanji)
  34. Latvian
  35. Lithuanian
  36. Malay
  37. Maltese
  38. Norwegian
  39. Pashto
  40. Persian
  41. Polish
  42. Portuguese
  43. Portuguese (Brazil)
  44. Romanian
  45. Russian
  46. Serbian
  47. Slovak
  48. Slovenian
  49. Somali
  50. Spanish
  51. Swahili
  52. Swedish
  53. Thai
  54. Turkish
  55. Ukrainian
  56. Urdu
  57. Uzbek
  58. Vietnamese


See also

Notes and references
  1. "Acquisition of SDL by RWS enhances capabilities in Language Services and Technology".
  2. "RWS Acquires MT Provider Iconic".
  3. "SDL Acquires Language Weaver, Adds Statistical Machine Translation to Portfolio".
  4. Ciucean, Andrei. "MT Edge and Language Pair Versions - March Update - Forum - Language Weaver Edge - RWS Community". community.sdl.com. Retrieved 23 September 2021.


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