2016: Our Year in Review

Last year, while walking down the memory lane, we made an almost clairvoyant comment. We said,

“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.”

And boy, has it been exciting! We have done so much – been to so many places! Between creating brilliant new features, researching the next level of technology innovation, accepting awards, making new partnerships, raising money for charity and attending trade fairs, shows and seminars, the team here at KantanMT has been busier than Santa’s little elves this year!

We believe that 2017 will see, what we would like to call, the emergence of Machine Translation 2.0, and thanks to KantanLabs, our new Research and Development department, we are perfectly poised to become a part of the change that will take place in the language industry.

2016 has been yet another successful year for KantanMT, for which we owe our gratitude and thanks not only to our amazing clients, but also to all our partners and supporters. We strongly believe that the key to making a product or service successful lies in constant innovation and updates. So, all our efforts in 2016 were channelled towards making KantanMT the strongest Custom Machine Translation service provider in the industry – effort, which has been appreciated and recognised thoroughly by experts within and outside the industry.

1. Awards and Recognition Galore

KantanMT’s contribution to technological excellence in innovation was recognised and awarded this year at the annual Irish Software Awards 2016 (ISA 2016) industry award ceremony, where we emerged as the winner in Technology Innovation Award category. We were also shortlisted for the ‘Emerging Company of the Year’ and for the ‘Outstanding Achievement in International Growth’ categories in ISA; also for the ‘New Frontiers’ category of the Irish Times Innovation Awards and for the ‘High Potential Exporters Award’ category of the Export Industry Awards 2016.

We are gratified with all the recognition and congratulations pouring in, and we aim to make major innovations in our Custom Machine Translation platform in 2017.

2. KantanLabs Ready to Disrupt the Industry

We launched our R&D Department, KantanLabs, headed by Dr Dimitar Shterionov this year, and we have already completed numerous projects, which will simplify and improve the Machine Translation process further. Our word reordering project, funded by the EAMT, has shown brilliant results in real-life applications. KantanLabs is backed by academic support from ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology and other academic institutions that help advance the quality of automated translation output.

Other achievements by KantanLabs include the publication of two major papers with AMTA, and the development of a new system, which will incorporate traditional Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) with Neural Network technology, to create faster and more accurate translations.

3. Education Bringing Innovation

We strongly believe that today’s Translation and Language students are the innovators of tomorrow – they form the main backbone of the industry, and so we take our Academic Partnership very seriously. This year we added 16 new academic partners to our platform, which will help graduate and post graduate students to evaluate and deploy MT engines in a real-life setting.

Some universities that joined us for the first time include:

• University of Warsaw
• Universidad Europea
• Kirovohrad State University
• Rennes 2 University
• Ghent University
• Ludong University
• Aston University
• University of Antwerp

We also announced KantanAcademy, an online, self-paced learning resource to help language professionals acquire the skills they need to operate KantanMT successfully. KantanAcademy offers three courses, depending on the level of the learner; Machine Translation 101, Machine Translation Professional and Machine Translation Super User. On successful completion of the course, professionals will be awarded a certificate and an online badge, which can be added on their social profiles like LinkedIn.

4. Three New Features Announced

This year we launched three features, which have already begun to revolutionise the way MT is used. KantanFleet™ is a set of pre-built, translation ready, Custom MT engines, which help our clients start translation projects immediately. We often have clients who need to complete a big translation project, with no training data – our KantanFleet engines have been a major success in these projects.

KantanWidgets™ is a suite of productivity apps, designed to help our clients integrate KantanMT translation technology within their work environments. KantanTranslate™, KantanSnippet™, KantanOfficeMT™ and KantanDesktop™ help clients translate texts directly from the Internet and Intranet as well as from Microsoft Office programs. It also includes a desktop app, and a feature to embed the KantanMT translation technology within any website.

KantanLQR™ is one of the most powerful methods of evaluating Machine Translation quality. The tool, which is designed for Project Managers (PMs) and Reviewers, is an online quality review tool, dedicated to making human evaluation of Custom MT faster, seamless and more efficient. KantanLQR has dramatically reduced the time required to build MT engines with the help of on-point, detailed and timely reports about each reviewer’s segment analysis.

5. Getting Out There and Meeting New and Existing Clients

KantanMT had a packed schedule, attending 30+ events and conferences all around the world to share innovations and talk about new ideas with like-minded people in the industry. We went to the SXSW festival and AMTA in Texas, the Write2Users Conference, the Translating Europe forum, and a number of TAUS Events.

On our home turf, in Dublin, we joined the LavaCon Conference as a Gold sponsor and introduced Guinness to our fellow industry peers at LocWorld31 as a Bronze sponsor.

We brought Guinness to Germany at the Tekom/ tcworld Conference 2016.

6. Getting Together for Charity

This year, we raised €500 for Temple Street Children’s Hospital. You can see all the delectable baked goodies on our Facebook page. Our biggest event of the year, the Coastal Flag Challenge, saw a group of hikers and adventure lovers from the language industry test their mental grit and physical agility in a Treasure Hunt Hike around Howth Peninsula, which raised over €5,000 for Translators Without Borders (TWB). TWB is a non-profit organisation that works to close critical language gaps that hinder humanitarian efforts worldwide by supporting the work of hundreds of organisations in the areas of crisis relief, health and education.

You can see all the photos in our Facebook album.

Finally, we ended the year with a Moustachioed charity event, where the KantanMo Team raised €352 for the Movember Foundation, which aims to “change the face of men’s health.”

Thank You!

We had a great year, thanks to our growing community of clients and partners. It’s your feedback and your support that has helped us surpass our own expectations. With more than 3 major feature releases, and more to be unveiled in 2017, we can safely say that we had a very good year.

We are really excited about some changes that the new year will bring – while that’s all we can reveal now, we promise that it’s going to make you love us more!

On behalf of the KantanMT Team, we would like to wish you a very happy holiday season and a successful and prosperous New Year.