SYSTRAN Partners with TED to Create Specialized Translation Models Expanding Professional Applications of Machine Translation

Neural translation models leverage TED's unique data and SYSTRAN AI expertise

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Sep 30, 2020, 08:00 ET

SAN DIEGO, Sept. 30, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- SYSTRAN, the leader in AI-based translation technology, announces its new partnership with TED, a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading, to build specialized neural translation models that are based on high-quality translations of TED Talks. These unique models are designed to meet the sophisticated translation needs of multinational companies, educational institutions, government agencies and other organizations by enabling accurate and fluent translations of learning, scientific, business and technical content in 10 languages.

"SYSTRAN is TED's first-ever authorized partner in bringing together TED content and machine learning to develop a commercial product," said Alex Hofmann, Director, Global Distribution & Licensing at TED. "The fact that our inaugural collaboration in the AI space is focused on neural machine translation models built from translations of TED Talks in multiple languages feels natural and are now available on a licensed basis to help enterprises and organizations meet their most sophisticated translation needs."

The proprietary models are developed by SYSTRAN, pairing TED's unique multilingual data and SYSTRAN's AI expertise, and are an early step in advancing TED data usage in wider applications. Authorized use of TED data for commercial AI and machine learning purposes requires a license from TED, and SYSTRAN is the first to obtain such a license. In accordance with SYSTRAN's core principles of security and data privacy, TED fully preserves its intellectual property and ownership of its data as well as the specialized models. The TED-owned models are available on the SYSTRAN Marketplace, a catalog of specialized models for specific domains such as legal, finance, health, education, science/technology and many more.

"This strategic partnership is about taking our shared goals of connecting people and cultures and facilitating multilingual engagement globally," said CIO of SYSTRAN, John Paul Barraza. "The human-created translations generated by the TED Translator community are of the highest quality, enabling SYSTRAN to build accurate and fluent translation models for use across a plethora of business and professional applications."

SYSTRAN conducted double-blind human evaluations on the TED models it built, and the results show impressive improvements in both accuracy and fluency over baseline state-of-the-art generic models. The human evaluations also revealed unanticipated results, with 41 percent of the models scoring higher than the human reference translations.

"The current global situation is showing us how inter-connected the different countries and populations worldwide are. Companies are imagining a world with far less boundaries – starting with the way we communicate," said Jean Senellart, SYSTRAN CEO. "Introducing TED models to the SYSTRAN Marketplace is an incredible opportunity and will respond to real needs in the translation of educational, business, scientific, and technical materials."

For more information, visit https://www.systransoft.com/TED.

About SYSTRAN
With more than 50 years of experience, SYSTRAN provides business users with advanced and secure translation solutions. For more information, visit www.systrangroup.com.

To help organizations enhance multilingual communication and increase productivity, SYSTRAN delivers real-time language solutions for e-Learning, internal secure collaboration, eDiscovery and Governance/Compliance, content management, customer support, e-Commerce, and much more. To learn more information about SYSTRAN's professional translation software and solutions visit systransoft.com/translation-products/.

About TED
TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading, often in the form of short talks delivered by leading thinkers and doers. Many of these talks are given at TED conferences, intimate TED Salons and thousands of independently organized TEDx events around the world. Videos of these talks are made available, free, on TED.com and other platforms. Audio versions of TED Talks are published to TED Talks Daily, available on all podcast platforms.

TED's open and free initiatives for spreading ideas include TED.com, where new TED Talk videos are posted daily; TED Translators, which crowdsources the subtitling of TED Talks so that big ideas can spread across languages and borders; TEDx, which licenses thousands of individuals and groups to host local, self-organized TED-style events around the world; the TED Fellows program, which selects innovators from around the globe to amplify the impact of their remarkable projects and activities; The Audacious Project, which surfaces and funds critical ideas that have the potential to impact millions of lives; and the educational initiative TED-Ed. TED also offers TED@Work, a program that reimagines TED Talks for workplace learning. TED also has a growing library of original podcasts, including The TED Interview with Chris Anderson, WorkLife with Adam Grant, Pindrop and TEDxSHORTS.