Company:Language Weaver

Language Weaver

Type of site	Neural machine translation
Available in	58 languages and language varieties
Owner	RWS
Website	www.rws.com/language-weaver/
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Yes
Launched	2002 (2002)
Current status	Active

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

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 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.

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:

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

• RWS Group
• SDL