PROMT
Encyclopedia
PROMT is a Russian company focused upon the development of machine translation systems. At the moment PROMT translators exist for English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Russian languages. PROMT is headquartered in Saint Petersburg
, Russia and also has offices in Moscow, Russia, San Francisco, the USA and Hamburg, Germany. Except the system of machine translation PROMT also delivers its own solutions on the basis of the Translation memory
technology.
. Svetlana Sokolova is the head of the company from its first day.
On October 6, 1998 PROMT launches the first Russian web service Translate.ru, intended for translation of the text or a web pages. It also has an English version Online-Translator http://www.online-translator.com.
In 1997 PROMT together with the French company Softissimo develops a number of products for the western market called Reverso.
In 2008 the company controlling stake has been redeemed by Renova Group
. The sum of transaction is not disclosed, but according to Renova, the total amount of the world market of a translation service for the companies valued in 2007 at $9-10 billion, PROMT sales are 2 % from this sum, that is $180-200 million. Hence by evaluations of one of observers of the market, who wanted to remain unnamed, cost of the packet acquired by "Renova" is no more than $20-40 million .
(RBMT) . RBMT is a general term that denotes machine translation systems based on linguistic information about source and target languages basically retrieved from (bilingual) dictionaries and grammars covering the main semantic, morphological, and syntactic regularities of each language respectively. Having input sentences (in some source language), an RBMT system generates them to output sentences (in some target language) on the basis of morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis of both the source and the target languages involved in a concrete translation task.
At the end of 2010 of PROMT provided the Hybrid technology of translation leverages the strengths of Statistical machine translation
and rule-based translation methodologies. The approaches differ in a number of ways:
Rules post-processed by statistics: Translations are performed using a rules based engine. Statistics are then used in an attempt to adjust/correct the output from the rules engine.
Statistics guided by rules: Rules are used to pre-process data in an attempt to better guide the statistical engine. Rules are also used to post-process the statistical output to perform functions such as normalization. This approach has a lot more power, flexibility and control when translating.
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
, Russia and also has offices in Moscow, Russia, San Francisco, the USA and Hamburg, Germany. Except the system of machine translation PROMT also delivers its own solutions on the basis of the Translation memory
Translation memory
A translation memory, or TM, is a database that stores so-called "segments", which can be sentences or sentence-like units that have previously been translated. A translation memory system stores the words, phrases and paragraphs that have already been translated, in order to aid human translators...
technology.
History
The company was founded in St.-Petersburg in 1991 by the former employees of laboratory of engineering linguistics of Herzen UniversityHerzen University
The State Russian Herzen Pedagogical University is one of the largest universities in Russia. Located in Saint Petersburg, it operates 20 faculties and more than 100 departments. Embroidered in its structure are the Institute of Pre-University Courses, the Institute of Continuous Professional...
. Svetlana Sokolova is the head of the company from its first day.
On October 6, 1998 PROMT launches the first Russian web service Translate.ru, intended for translation of the text or a web pages. It also has an English version Online-Translator http://www.online-translator.com.
In 1997 PROMT together with the French company Softissimo develops a number of products for the western market called Reverso.
In 2008 the company controlling stake has been redeemed by Renova Group
Renova Group
Renova Group is a large Russian conglomerate with interests in aluminium, oil, energy, telecoms and a variety of other sectors. The main owner and president is Viktor Vekselberg....
. The sum of transaction is not disclosed, but according to Renova, the total amount of the world market of a translation service for the companies valued in 2007 at $9-10 billion, PROMT sales are 2 % from this sum, that is $180-200 million. Hence by evaluations of one of observers of the market, who wanted to remain unnamed, cost of the packet acquired by "Renova" is no more than $20-40 million .
Technology
PROMT translation is a rule-based machine translationRule-based machine translation
Rule-based Machine Translation is a general term that denotes machine translation systems based on linguistic information about source and target languages basically retrieved from dictionaries and grammars covering the main semantic, morphological, and syntactic...
(RBMT) . RBMT is a general term that denotes machine translation systems based on linguistic information about source and target languages basically retrieved from (bilingual) dictionaries and grammars covering the main semantic, morphological, and syntactic regularities of each language respectively. Having input sentences (in some source language), an RBMT system generates them to output sentences (in some target language) on the basis of morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis of both the source and the target languages involved in a concrete translation task.
At the end of 2010 of PROMT provided the Hybrid technology of translation leverages the strengths of Statistical machine translation
Statistical machine translation
Statistical machine translation is a machine translation paradigm where translations are generated on the basis of statistical models whose parameters are derived from the analysis of bilingual text corpora...
and rule-based translation methodologies. The approaches differ in a number of ways:
Rules post-processed by statistics: Translations are performed using a rules based engine. Statistics are then used in an attempt to adjust/correct the output from the rules engine.
Statistics guided by rules: Rules are used to pre-process data in an attempt to better guide the statistical engine. Rules are also used to post-process the statistical output to perform functions such as normalization. This approach has a lot more power, flexibility and control when translating.