MAIDENHEAD, England,
June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --
SDL (LSE: SDL), a leader in global content management,
translation and digital experience, today announced that its
next-generation SDL Neural Machine Translation (NMT) 2.0 has
mastered Russian to English translation, one of the toughest
linguistic Artificial Intelligence (AI) problems to date.
SDL NMT 2.0 outperformed all industry standards, setting a
benchmark for Russian to English machine translation, with over 90%
of the system's output labelled as perfect by professional
Russian-English translators. The new SDL NMT 2.0 Russian engine is
being made available to enterprise customers via SDL Enterprise
Translation Server (ETS), a secure NMT product, enabling
organizations to translate large volumes of information into
multiple languages.
"One of the toughest linguistic challenges facing the machine
translation community has been overcome by our team," said
Adolfo Hernandez, CEO, SDL. "It was
the Russian language that first inspired the science and research
behind machine translation, and since then it has always been a
major challenge for the community. SDL has deployed breakthrough
research strategies to master these difficult languages, and
support the global expansion of its enterprise customers. We have
pushed the boundaries and raised the performance bar even higher,
and we are now paving the way for leadership in other complex
languages."
The linguistic properties and intricacies of the Russian
language relative to English make it particularly challenging for
MT systems to model. Russian is a highly inflected language with
different syntax, grammar, and word order compared to English.
Given the complexities created by these differences between the
Russian and English language, raising the translation quality has
been an ongoing focus of the SDL Machine Learning R&D team.
"With over 15 years of research and innovation in machine
translation, our scientists and engineers took up the challenge to
bring Neural MT to the next level," said Samad Echihabi, Head of
Machine Learning R&D, SDL. "We have been evolving, optimizing
and adapting our neural technology to deal with highly complex
translation tasks such as Russian to English, with phenomenal
results. A machine running SDL NMT 2.0 can now produce translations
of Russian text virtually indistinguishable from what
Russian-English bilingual humans can produce."
SDL NMT 2.0 is optimized for both accuracy and fluency and
provides a powerful paradigm to deal with morphologically rich
languages. It has been designed to adapt to the quality and
quantity of the data it is trained on leading to high learning
efficiency. SDL NMT 2.0 is also developed with the enterprise in
mind with a significant focus on translation production speed and
user control via terminology support. This also adds another level
of productivity to Language Services Providers, and SDL's own
translators will be first to get access and benefit from this
development.
Powered by SDL NMT 2.0, SDL Enterprise Translation Server (ETS)
transforms the way global enterprises understand, communicate,
collaborate and do business enabling them to securely translate and
deliver large volumes of content into one or more languages
quickly. Offering total control and security of translation data,
SDL ETS has been successfully used in the government sector as well
for over a decade.
About SDL
SDL (LSE:SDL) is the global innovator in language translation
technology, services and content management. For over 25 years
we've helped companies deliver transformative business results by
enabling powerful, nuanced digital experiences with customers
around the world. Are you in the know? Find out why 79 out of the
top 100 global brands work with us at SDL.com. Follow us on
LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
SOURCE SDL