Industry News ITP opens offices in Eastern Europe and North America After establishing a presence in Tokyo and Beijing in 1997, International Translation & Publishing Ltd., one of LISA's 1998 Japan Conference hosts, is continuing its expansion drive by opening offices in Hungary, Romania and the US. ITP Hungary (Budapest) is slated to offer a full range of localization services to the Eastern European market, including translation, software engineering, project management and desktop publishing. It will be assisted in this effort by its subsidiary, ITP Romania, which is 51% owned by ITP and 49% owned by local managers. According to Gábor Tóth of ITP Hungary, the main focus in Eastern Europe will be on Hungarian, Romanian and Czech, with plans to tap into the Slovak and Ukrainian markets. ITP Salt Lake City will provide sales and client support for North and South American localization services, primarily into Brazilian Portuguese, Latin American Spanish and Canadian French. LMI acquires ALSC and Lazoski Beninatto Denver, Colorado-based Language Management International (LMI) recently purchased Lazoski Beninatto of Brazil and Asian Language Support Center (ALSC) of Singapore, extending its reach for providing in-country language management services to these two regions. Lazoski Beninatto, which has offices in Rio de Janeiro and Rosario, Argentina, brings 15 years of experience in providing Spanish and Portuguese language management services to major corporations (Digital Equipment Corp., Xerox, Hewlett-Packard) to the deal. The acquisition of ALSC will enhance LMI's Asian language capabilities and is expected to provide a stable base for serving the Asian market. LMI's continuing strategy is to acquire profitable enterprises in the language management field and integrate them into its worldwide operations. The company plans to announce European expansion plans in the near future. Polylang purchased by SDL International Full-service localization vendors SDL International, LISA's 1998 Salt Lake City hosts, recently acquired Polylang in a step to further its aim of becoming one of the world's top five independent localization companies. Polylang is a specialist in Website and multimedia localization (including AV recording/post-production and graphics services), fields which complement SDL's lines of business. Polylang has offices in the UK, Germany and France. Mark Lancaster, Founder and Managing Director of SDL, stated that the acquisition was the first of a number of deals designed to achieve critical mass for a market flotation of SDL. STAR Group plans expansion/New UK office opened Following its successful opening of subsidiaries in Japan and China, Swiss-based tool and service provider STAR Group has opened in the United Kingdom. The new subsidiary, STAR UK Ltd., began operations in Surrey on November 1, 1997. The Group, which recently moved its headquarters to a larger building in the town of Ramsen in response to its rapid expansion, has plans to open additional offices in 1998 and expects revenues to continue to increase sharply. ToBe SIG Update The LISA ToBe (Tools Benchmarking) SIG met on January 6, 1998 at McQueen's office in France. At the meeting, members agreed on the major objective of the SIG - to "establish an ongoing process of CAT tools benchmarking according to specific, real-life scenarios in an objective and professional manner." Based on this objective, participants also established a description for an initial evaluation of a translation memory (workbench) product. Topics covered included the scenario, major benchmarking criteria (an updated version of those presented during the 1997 Geneva workshop), tentative tools for evaluation and benchmarking partners. The ToBe SIG decided to outsource the benchmarking process to one or more independent organizations, to be chosen by the SIG members on the basis of bid replies from a preselected list of professionally acceptable potential partners. This list will probably include university/research center teams involved in computer-aided linguistic tools, and some professional evaluation/testing organizations. The major qualifying factors are professionalism and independence (i.e. not commercially active in localization). Please contact Leon Rubinstein for more information: Leon Rubinstein McQueen France ZAC du Pont Blanc 26-28, rue Henri Becquerel 93275 Sevran Cedex France Tel. (+33)-1-49-36-53-23 Fax (+33)-1-49-36-53-33 E-mail: leon.rubinstein@mcqueen.com Lernout & Hauspie launches Coronado Lernout & Hauspie unveiled its new service, Coronado, on January 28 at Internet Showcase in San Diego. Described as the industry's first multilingual Internet search summarization and online document translation service, Coronado is designed to bridge the communication gap for non-English speakers on the Internet. Currently 80% of the information available on the Internet is in English. Non-English speakers can initiate search queries in their native languages with Coronado. French, German and Spanish will be available in the initial version of the service. Later releases of Coronado will also support Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Japanese and Portuguese. The user's search terms are translated into all of the languages the system supports and submitted to 35 different search engines or indexes. Then the results of the search are translated into the language of the query and returned to the user in the form of three to four sentence summaries. After looking through the summaries, users can have documents of particular relevance translated by clicking an icon which sends the document to a server running the GMS T1 machine translation system. If this rough translation is not sufficient, the user may then opt for a full machine translation with human post-editing. Alternatively, Lernout & Hauspie's Mendez Translation Group will also offer complete human translations. Pre-defined searches can be performed at regular intervals and the results translated automatically using Coronado's "Task Manager" feature. Coronado will be beta-tested in Q2 of 1998 and will be available via subscription through ISPs, telecommunications service providers, content providers and other Lernout & Hauspie marketing partners.