Translating the Web

January 20, 2009

The company was founded by linguist Oded Broshi, Alfabetic’s CEO, who has a background in brain research. “My vision came from Hollywood…Everyone wants to see movies from Hollywood. Subtitles and dubbing made it possible, and most of Hollywood’s revenue now comes from foreign sales. We thought we could do the same for the hottest foreign content in English,” says Broshi, whose company has built a translation machine based on artificial intelligence.

Broshi explains that a new breakthrough in the academic world in statistical machine translations has enabled superior machine learning of languages. These algorithms from the academic world, paired with Alfabetic’s own technology and an international team of translators, creates top-notch translated content—without the high costs. “The more put into the translation machine, the better it gets,” notes Broshi. He offers an attractive business model: a three way split of ad revenues for the content owner, the syndicate, and Alfabetic.

The Alfabetic team first creates a clone of a news site. It then takes RSS [Web format] news feed articles and plugs them into the translation machine, with no cost to the content owner. The output, produced in seconds, is then fed to a team of translators, who tweak the translated material to ensure no machine-generated or cultural errors. A head editor in the foreign language reviews the final translation before it gets published. The company is fully operational and is looking for large content partners from the Western world.

Excerpts from an article by Karin Kloosterman, www.israel21c.org

For more information: www.alfabetic.com

 

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