While chatting over a mouthful of mince pies, some tourtière and a few classy glasses of mulled wine this week, we at KantanMT were suddenly struck by the realisation that 2015 was perhaps one of the most sensational, successful and eventful years for us in the company! And the fact is, we can’t wait to start working on everything that we have planned for 2016 – we are certain that the new year is going to be even more exciting for us.
We have been pretty busy disrupting the language industry by releasing new innovations and improving older features that have gone on to make translation and localization extremely effective, yet simple and viable for our clients. We strongly believe that the key to making a product or service a global success lies in developing an effective localization workflow. All our efforts in 2015 were channelled towards helping our clients reach global markets ahead of their competitors, and setting new benchmarks in the language industry for Custom Machine Translation (CMT) quality and scalability.
In this post, we would like to share the special events, milestones and achievements that we enjoyed in the past year, and extend our gratitude towards our community of clients, partners and other individuals who placed their faith in us and helped us to reach this new and exciting phase of our journey.
1. Breaking Records
KantanMT celebrated a major milestone with 1 billion words translated on the platform. Of course, it goes without saying that we were incredibly proud of our platform, but little did we know that in less than 4 months from then we would be celebrating the completion of a whopping 5 billion words translated on the platform!
It boggles the mind, doesn’t it? To put this in more “realistic terms,” a recent platform usage analysis revealed that, when compared to the average human translator output (2,500 words per day), a client using KantanMT was able to translate and publish the equivalent of 54,000 human translator days of content in a single 24-hour period, which is the same as 18,000 human translator days in one 8-hour day.
This represents an increase in translation productivity of 18000:1 (24hrs = 3 x 8hr translator days).
We reached another milestone a few weeks back with more than 8,100 CMT engines built and deployed on the KantanMT.com.
“The number of CMT engines built on KantanMT.com is extremely high by Custom MT industry standards. We could not have reached this milestone without our clients placing their faith in us and the translation capabilities of the platform.” (Tony O’Dowd, KantanMT News)
2. A Growing Team
2015 saw a number of new additions to the KantanMT team. Our strength at KantanMT lies in our excellent and dedicated team members who make it possible for us to continuously improve our translation solutions and bring more to the table for our clients. With this in mind, we added a number of new members to the team including Louise Faherty, Technical Project Manager, Poulomi Choudhury, Content Developer, Riccardo Superbo and Dimitar Shterionov, Localization Engineer (MT Specialist) and Senior Software Developer, Marc Anthony Palminteri, Seosamh O Cinneide and Carlos Collantes, as a Software Engineer and Associate Software Development Engineers.
Brian Baird joined the KantanMT Board of Directors and Brian Coyle came on board as the Chief Commercial Officer. In a short space of time he has helped reshape the company and contribute towards a focused growth trajectory for the KantanMT.
3. A complete CMT ecosystem
In keeping with our vision for a well-integrated translation workflow, KantanMT joined hands with a number of new partners including, Turkish Language Service Provider, Transistent, Alchemy Software Development, a well-known Irish localization company and Leading Asian LSP, HansemEUG. We were also very happy to see Milengo renew their partnership, which has proven to be very successful for us and our KantanMT Community.
Adding to a robust list of industry partners in 2015, Write2Users partnered with us to bring further innovation and growth into the field of localization in Scandinavia. We also announced a new API integration from Vistatec and Spartan Software Inc. that supports KantanMT through the Okapi Framework. Read more about our partners here.
4. Education Bringing Innovation
We believe that today’s Translation and Language students are the innovators of tomorrow, and because of this we are delighted that our university partner program is expanding. KantanMT now employ three graduates from the DCU Master’s course and one PhD researcher from the University of Salamanca.
Some universities that renewed their partnership or joined us for the first time include:
- University College London, UK
- University of Salamanca, Spain
- Swansea University, UK
- University of Alcalá, Spain
- Dublin City University, Ireland
- Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), Switzerland
- University of New South Wales, Australia
- University of Texas at Arlington, U.S.
Read more about our University Partners here.
5. Innovating with New Technology and Features
The development team were busy this year and lots of new KantanMT features were announced. One of which promises to revolutionise the MT Language Quality Review (LQR) process. KantanLQR™ is a new project management tool for the KantanMT Community, which aims to reduce the time required to evaluate the linguistic quality of KantanMT engines by as much as 50%. The game-changing feature will have limited release from December 2015 and is scheduled for general release to the KantanMT Community in early 2016.
Other new developments include, KantanSwift™, which improves translation speed by up to 250%. KantanTemplates™, which saves time building KantanMT engines and KantanNER™, a new pre-processing feature that drastically improves MT quality.
6. Getting out there and Meeting New and Existing Clients
KantanMT was busy in 2015, the team travelled around the globe to raise more awareness about Custom Machine Translation and its ability to help access new customers in new global markets. MT has evolved a great deal in the past decade and with the improvement in quality and usefulness of MT, more LSPs as well as large-scale enterprises are integrating MT within their localization workflows. We believe that being the leading provider of Custom Machine Translation (CMT) is not enough, we need to meet our industry peers, discuss, share, brainstorm and put to action the latest developments in the translation and localization industry.
“We met some brilliant people from the language and technical communication field during our visits, and below are just some of the images from our MT adventures!”
Some of this year’s events include; EUATC conference, Help & Localization Conference, the National Conference on Cloud Computing and Commerce, LocWorld, TAUS Industry Leaders Forum, Summit for Technical Communication and the LavaCon Content Strategy and TechComm Management Conference and Tekom/TcWorld. The ARTIS Conference in University College London was also jointly sponsored by KantanMT and XTM International this year.
We have a lot planned for 2016, and we are already looking forward to Retail Business Technology Expo (RBTE) 2016 at the Olympia, in London, March 9th-10th, 2016. Brian Coyle will take the Big Apple by storm at the National Retail Federation, Retail’s Big Show 2016 at the Jacob K.Javits Convention Centre, New York City.
7. Our Community – Who are our Top Clients?
eRetailers (online retailers) were one of the largest MT user groups in 2015. Our eRetail clients leverage the precise, scalable, high-quality Fully Automated Usable Translations (FAUT) produced by the KantanMT engines to get their products to international customers faster. This year, KantanMT made a huge impact in the eRetail industry, and will continue this trend in 2016!
Read more about CMT and eRetail in our white paper: ‘9 Ways Machine Translation will Revolutionise eCommerce in 2016’.
8. Work Hard, Play Harder!
During the summer, the KantanMT team displayed oodles of social responsibility while bonding as a team in the Techies4TempleStreet (T4TS) event, which was Ireland’s first-ever charity Treasure Trail. In the lead up to the event, the team carried out separate events to raise awareness and funds for Temple Street, Ireland’s National Children’s Hospital, including a crossword challenge and a team building and networking hike in the beautiful Howth peninsula.
Did you read about our antics around the city of Dublin here a few months back? If you didn’t here’s one of our favourite pictures from the treasure trail!
https://twitter.com/T4TS20/status/649964955035435008/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Continuing in 2016, KantanMT will organise another hike to Howth to support Translators Without Borders (TWB), a non-profit organisation that provides free professional translations to aid humanitarian activities. Read more about KantanMT’s contribution here.
Apart from attending conferences and partnering with universities, KantanMT supported the language industry by sponsoring a number of events, including the concert at the Elia Networking Days event in Lyon, France. Tony O’Dowd from KantanMT and Jeff Allen from SAP took to the stage as the Bilingual Busking Buddies (B3) much to the amusement of the rest of the team members here in KantanMT!
In October, Tony joined other musical industry leaders in the TAUS House Band at the Annual Conference dinner in San Jose.
Final Words…
We had a great year thanks to our growing community of clients and partners, it is their feedback and support that we have been able to surpass our own expectations, and we are very excited for what 2016 holds.
