MITRE Licenses Machine Translation and Instant Messaging Tool

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

McLean, Virginia, August 13, 2002 — MITRE's Technology Transfer Office has licensed the Translingual Instant Messaging (TrIM) prototype, a communications tool that provides automatic language translation services for instant messaging users, to the New York-based company, Transclick.

TrIM is built on MITRE's Simple Instant Messaging & Presence (SIMP) (simp.mitre.org) distributed instant messaging architecture. TrIM uses the SIMP instant messaging protocol to distribute language translation services. Multiple parties, using different language translation servers, can converse at the same time. All parties to a conversation see both original messages and their translations.

TrIM was developed as a research tool for experimenting with machine translation of short messages in military coalition environments. As such, TrIM has logging capabilities that aid in the analysis of machine translated multilingual dialog. Understanding the differences between the informal language used in short messages and the formal language used in documents is key to improving machine translation for messaging applications, and is one of MITRE's research goals.

Transclick will bundle TrIM with its other translated messaging products and security solutions. The company plans to market the translated instant messenger to the military for collaboration between allies as well as in web-based communication applications for travel and hospitality industries, global education, and diplomacy.

Robert Levin, CEO of Transclick said today, "We are excited to add language pairs and enhance the quality of real-time translation of instant messaging. This will benefit a global marketplace that is ready and eager to collaborate across language barriers as a way to save time, money and lives."

"As a not-for-profit operating three federally funded research and development centers, MITRE is not in the business of selling products. Licensing our prototypes to companies such as Transclick is one of the best ways to get the technology available and supported for our government sponsors in an affordable manner" says MITRE Technology Transfer Program Director Gerard Eldering.

MITRE (www.mitre.org) is a not-for-profit national resource that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government. It operates federally funded research and development centers for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, with principal locations in Bedford, Massachusetts, and McLean, Virginia.

Transclick is a web services and systems integration company that integrates real-time language translation into web services such as email, instant messaging and web servers, based in New York. The company integrates translation solutions with terminology databases for government and enterprise clients to best fit their needs and budget. Transclick is now implementing a two-year research and development speech-to-speech translation project with the US Army which will be available to the commercial market for web-based collaboration and CRM applications.

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