Fast growth language services provider, Applied Language Solutions (ALS), has added significantly more weight to its machine translation offer with the acquisition of Dublin-based Traslan Teoranta Ltd.

ALS identified the opportunity to strengthen its machine translation knowledge and capabilities through the acquisition of Traslan, which has a deep-rooted reputation for machine translation expertise. The acquisition also gives the ALS team access to an established customer base in Ireland, which it can target with additional language services, not previously provided by Traslan.

Machine translation has gained significant momentum in the language services industry in recent years, particularly since the introduction of statistical machine translation technology in 2003. Traslan was established in response to this advancement in machine-assisted translation and designed and built its own MT engine, with has proven to be very successful with particular language pairs.

Commenting on the company's second recent acquisition, Gavin Wheeldon, CEO at Applied Language Solutions, said: "Traslan gives our team of IT developers access to a proprietary engine, which is extremely valuable in terms of our MT intellectual property. The company has a reputation for being actively involved with cutting-edge EU research and this is something that we are keen to continue with as we integrate Traslan into ALS. This move further cements our commitment to MT within our language services provision."

ALS has offered custom-built machine translation engines to customers for two years, having focused its in-house developers on building and tuning custom engines, which can halve translation budgets and more than double translation turnaround speed. This service, which has historically been based upon MOSES open source technology, has attracted projects from a number of high-profile customers including Dell, Caterpillar and Credit Suisse. Demand for MT solutions is expected to increase considerably as the quality of machine translation output and the volumes able to be processed increases due to advancements in technology. The Traslan MT engine will accelerate this development and MT strategy implementation within ALS considerably.

Professor Andy Way, one of the owners of Traslan, became a consultant to ALS in November 2010 and continues to provide knowledge and support for funding bids around further research and development in the area of machine translation. No members of staff will transfer to ALS as a result of the acquisition.

ENDS

Press contact: Anna Simpkins, anna.simpkins@appliedlanguage.com, +44 (0)844 888 7203

About Applied Language Solutions

Applied Language Solutions was founded in 2003 by CEO, Gavin Wheeldon to provide translation and interpreting solutions to global public and private sector organisations. The business employs 135 people across 11 international offices and achieved £7.2million turnover in 2010.