I had the pleasure of speaking with Brian Garr of IBM’s Application and Integration Middleware Software (AIM) group (WebSphere), this morning about IBM’s WebSphere Translation Server (WTS) 5.0, which was announced at Lotusphere last week. I have to say I’m impressed. If you are not familiar with it, WTS it is middleware that provides the capability of translating text from one language to another, and with this release they are up to nine languages, which include traditional and simplified Chinese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese and Korean. If you don’t ever have to translate from one language to another you probably wouldn’t care, but for the millions of people, just in this country alone, that don’t have English as their first language, being able to read documents, web sites, and myriad other kinds of text, without having to find a translator, is a godsend.
In an earlier release, WTS has been used by hundreds of schools and non-profit organizations to translate websites and emails from Spanish to English and English to Spanish. This capability was provided by IBM’s corporate giving group through an IBM sponsored web site called Traducelo Ahora (Translate Now!). An independent analysis of the pilot of this program concluded that having this capability has done everything from enrich English as a Second Language (ESL) programs, to assist students and job seekers in doing research, etc.
WTS Release 5.0, however, was announced at Lotusphere as a downloadable plug-in to the Lotus Symphony Beta 4 software release, announced in Q4’07. Lotus Symphony is a free suite of desktop productivity tools, including word processing and spreadsheets, which IBM has equipped with several plug-ins to enhance the productivity capabilities of the software. For example, with WTS, users will be able to add the plug-in and then click on the icon within the program they are using to translate contents of the document. So, for example, a user could translate the contents of a presentation, spreadsheet or regular text document. The software detects the source language and translates accordingly.
For the Beta release of WTS, the plug-in provides translation from English to Spanish and back and from simplified Chinese to English and back. For individuals in enterprises that have more complex needs, a server-based version of the product will be available that will provide them with additional functionality such as customized dictionaries and lexicons, and the full breadth of languages they support.