Few French have heard the company Systran. But it is a real technological gem, which offers its machine translation software to businesses and the general public, but not only. In reality, the real big customer of the French company is none other than the U.S. intelligence community. And first the now famous NSA (National Security Agency), which literally put the world tapped. She wants to translate everything into English, either (among others) emails, newspapers, websites siphoning it permanently. In virtually all U.S. services, so they are French software running full translate all imaginable languages. Well, almost … For the common man, who can buy its software commercially, Systran offers 52 “pairs” of languages, including both the Chinese and Japanese and Serbo-Croatian, which means that it translates 52 languages in 51 others. In fact, for the U.S. intelligence services, Systran made efforts to remain confidential. How many languages? Mystery … As recalled a case recently published in the scientific magazine Search , the world is no less than 7000 languages. 274 of them are spoken by a billion people, the other six billion in 6700 speaking different languages! But only 74 languages are spoken by more than 10 million people. And among them Russian. In the 1950s, which witnessed the birth IT infancy, only the language of Pushkin and Lenin interested spies Uncle Sam They must translate tons of papers and technical documents and undertake to quickly automate. Not without difficulty, the U.S. Air Force and various laboratories related services reach in 1964 to develop an IBM Machine Mark II operational translate Russian into English. As is often the case in the information technology in the United States, the intelligence services want the most advanced technologies and often accept as they are funded as proposed in the trade. This is exactly what happens in 1968: one of the most prominent researchers in the field of machine translation, Peter Toma, the California Institute of Technology, Launches Systran company with the aim to improve the translation from Russian into English. Systran then becomes exclusive supplier of translation systems for U.S. spies, and soon started in languages other than Russian. This will be the first French and Spanish. But scientists are not always good managers, technical success Systran are no longer accompanied by economic success. In addition to this American story, a French specialist in industrial valves, Jean Gachot, s’ strongly interested in computers in the early 1980s. He believes discern opportunities in machine translation and begins to acquire a license from Systran translate Arabic to English to. Then he decided to buy Systran in 1985 to its founder Peter Toma. The Company retains all its contracts in the United States, committed to significant research and development, but financial success is still not at the rendezvous. Purchased in 1993 by its current CEO, Dimitris Sabatakakis, the company employs 75 people and has about 10 million of revenue per year. It is now the world leader in its field. A little gem of what is called in France the BITD, or industrial and technological defense base, which in this cruel world has taken the slogan Camus’s phrase “my country is the French language.”
First Russian, then French
World Leader
