SYSTRAN was one of the first developers of machine translation software. Founded in 1968 out of pioneering research at Georgetown University, SYSTRAN’s vision is to enable individuals to communicate with each other in multiple languages with software that automatically translates information from one language into another.

During the Cold War, SYSTRAN cooperated with the US Air Force to create the first translation software from Russian to English. Today SYSTRAN continues to collaborate with the US Department of Defense to develop new language pairs as driven by geopolitical events.

SYSTRAN’s team is at the cutting-edge of research in the field of natural language processing – both linguistics and statistics. New methods aimed at improving SYSTRAN’s MT technology, in terms of quality, performance and interoperability, are constantly explored.

SYSTRAN invests more than 20% of its annual revenue in R&D. The SYSTRAN R&D team is located in Paris, France and San Diego, CA, USA, and is comprised of more than 40 engineers and computational linguists. SYSTRAN maintains strong relationships with leading universities and other recognized R&D teams around the world. SYSTRAN also engages in joint research and development programs, and successfully participates in international competitions for natural language processing.

Continuous Improvements in MT

SYSTRAN’s R&D team stays on top of the latest advances in linguistics and natural language processing, focusing on areas with the greatest growth potential. They continuously develop new machine translation systems, improve translation quality, and increase the robustness of solutions built with a multi-agent, multi-threaded architecture.

Standards are fundamental to the multilingual initiatives facilitated by SYSTRAN’s technology: web-based applications, email and instant messaging, intranets, content management, and more. SYSTRAN’s translation software runs on Linux, Solaris and Microsoft Windows.

Technology Breakthroughs

SYSTRAN has continually been the FIRST to deliver technology “breakthroughs”

  • First Neural Machine translation software producing an automatic translation overachieving the current state of the art and better than a non-native speaker
  • First hybrid translation software solution combining 50+ years of rule-based linguistics and the latest statistical techniques for publishable quality translation
  • First RSS translation solution
  • First translation software for mobile devices
  • First translation software integrated into multi-functional copiers
  • First XBRL translation solution
  • First XML translation solution
  • First Unicode compliant machine translation technology
  • First translation software integrated into games
  • First online translation service for Internet portals and websites
  • First client-server translation product for robust and quick translation over the Internet
  • First automatic dictionary coding application for rapid and automatic user created dictionaries
  • First translation technology integrated into handheld translators
  • First machine translation software for Windows
  • First machine translation solution used by the US Intelligence Community