Logos Corporation has been supplying machine translation (MT) products and related services for more than twenty-five years. Logos believes that the key to success in the MT market is to provide global solutions, rather than a single product. In addition to its own products, Logos is in partnership with other companies to provide additional translation solutions. While expanding its user base of MT systems in the translation community, Logos has now also taken the challenge of turning its natural language processing technology into modular components. It also intends to follow the Internet trend and offer on-line translation services.
Logos was founded in 1969 by Bernard E. Scott, currently Vice President in charge of Research. Logos first developed a prototype of an English to Vietnamese machine translation software for the US Government. The company expanded to Europe in 1982, when it opened its subsidiary Logos GmbH in Germany. This move followed a contract from Siemens, in 1979, to develop a German-English MT system. At the beginning of the 1990s, ownership passed from the original US investors to a group of European individuals and institutions.
Logos' US headquarters is in Mt. Arlington, New Jersey. Sales and marketing is located in Santa Clara, California. European headquarters is in Eschborn, Germany. Currently, there are more than 50 employees world-wide. Its development group is equally divided between computational linguists and system engineers. Sales and customer support are carried out both in the US and in Germany whereas development work is primarily done in the US. Logos also has a development partnership agreement with Softex GmbH in Germany where it pursues its extensive dictionary development.
A team of twelve linguists and ten computer programmers is in charge of core linguistic development in the US. Mount Arlington also serves as a customer support office. Out of the development group seven people work in Logos' advanced systems laboratory in Boston, developing front-end tools, spin-off products and interfaces. A third sales office became operative in late 1994 on the US West Coast. In Eschborn, Germany, currently 12 employees handle sales, marketing, development and customer support.
Logos' machine translation system is the result of over 1,500 person-years of development effort, and approx. US $ 35 million of R & D investment. Interfaces to the leading desktop publishing and word-processing systems as well as other translation support products are available to broaden its functionality. These include so far: Eurolang Optimizer for Logos, a translation memory and terminology management tool XL8® for Logos, to support software localization as well as translation memory. The company also provides a large range of services to ease the integration and implementation of its translation system. Logos Intelligent Translation System currently supports seven language pairs.
English-to-Portuguese is under development.
Logos has teamed up with other companies to extend the functions of its machine translation software and has been the first MT company to develop and make available a standard application programming interface allowing third parties to integrate the Logos MT engine into their applications. In France it has worked jointly with Eurolang who have developed an interface to its translation memory product called Eurolang Optimizer. In the US, Logos and GlobalWare co-developed XL8 for Logos. This product interfaces the Logos Intelligent Translation System with GlobalWare's XL8, a software localization product which handles text files, help files, resource files and code files.
Logos intends to develop its non-German and American sales. It regards the US as being a very promising market, because the very high demand which now exists for translation due to rapidly expanding global marketing activities. In Europe, it will concentrate on markets which require the language pairs the company offers.
The Logos Intelligent Translation System has an open-architecture design so that additional language pairs can be added easily. The company is currently developing an English-to-Portuguese language pair. It is looking for partners to share the cost of additional language pair development, especially when it comes to non-European languages, such as Arabic or Japanese.
The move towards client-server will be completed in 1995. Logos will deliver SQL interfaces to connect the Logos software to relational database systems. End-users will also be able to carry out maintenance of both lexical and semantic databases from their client, instead of only sending and retrieving documents.
In a move to increase the availability of its technology, Logos also intends to break it down into modules. It will offer grammar checking, index building or language learning utilities to be marketed by partners. In addition, Logos will develop and market further specialized dictionaries through a network of resellers.