Web translation services to be offered on MS office update Web site
Singapore, December 9 -- Lernout & Hauspie (NASDAQ: LHSP) (EASDAQ: LHSP) (L&H), today announced that its Internet translation services will be available through Microsoft's popular Office Update web site (http://www.officeupdate.com), providing millions of users with quick, easy access to both L&H's machine and human translation services.
The move addresses the growing market demand for translation services and is a major step in fulfilling L&H's strategy to employ the Internet as a primary vehicle for real-time translation service delivery. The company also recently announced its intentions to provide its own on-line translation services and has signed agreements with a number of other Internet service providers (ISPs) to offer L&H iTranslator through their sites.
Office Update web site visitors can submit text and documents to L&H for translation by clicking on an L&H icon located on the Web page. L&H will immediately provide free machine or ?gist? translations for documents up to one page in length. Documents that are greater than one page in length, those requiring machine translation supplemented by human translation or human translation only may be submitted to L&H for an immediate price quote. Users may opt to have machine translated documents to and from several different languages, including US English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Japanese, Russian, and Portuguese. Other machine translation language offerings are under development and for those requiring human translation, our services are available in most languages.
Microsoft's decision to offer our translation services on its Office Update web site is a powerful statement regarding the strategic importance of making multi-lingual translation services available to the global user community. It is also emphatic recognition of the outstanding quality, accuracy and breadth of L&H's translation capabilities, ? said Gaston Bastiaens, President and CEO of L&H.
This agreement adds several million more potential translation users to our already existing large base of customers. We predict this market, and the need for our services, will continue to expand as the growth of the Internet and globalization continues. Microsoft's Office customers are part of a diverse, global community with a growing need to translate information they receive from multi-lingual sources such as the Internet or international business partners, said Taylor Collier, Business Development Manager, Microsoft Office.
L&H's translation services will provide the opportunity to help millions of Office users quickly and easily translate documents to and from their native language. The agreement provides a number of noteworthy revenue enhancement opportunities for L&H. It gives L&H's Speech and Language Consulting & Services Division an opportunity to tap into millions of new potential customers to whom it can sell not only Internet translation but also its other offerings, which include document creation, human and machine translation and localization services. It also gives L&H an opportunity to sell advertising to other vendors as well as to offer its own products and services on the translated text results page it delivers to users.
As part of the agreement between the two companies, Microsoft will also help L&H promote its translation services through announcements on the Office Update home page and through listings on its e-services home page. L&H iTranslator on MS Office Site. The Internet is making us into a single world. Increasingly, we do business in global markets, where correspondence or business documents in a single language limit our ability to communicate, stated Amy Wohl, President of Wohl Associates.
L&H's translation tools will allow any user, in any market, to do business in many languages. It will give users free, fast and convenient machine translations to provide approximate meanings, while also offering L&H's many fee-paid human translation services to provide more polished documents.
L&H's Translation Solutions L&H's Speech and Language Consulting and Services Division provides document creation, human and machine translation and localization services in almost any language.
In addition to Internet and intranet translation, the division offers linguistic tools and services that help global companies create and adapt products, technical information and corporate messages to international markets.