OREANDA-NEWS. PROMT, the leading Russian developer of linguistic IT solutions for enterprise-level clients and private users, proudly announces that PROMT's translation technology has won the lead in an international contest in Bulgaria.

In August, 2013 in Sofia, during the Eighth Workshop for Statistical Machine Translation, organized by the Computer Linguistics Association, a traditional developer contest was held. Participating this year were 143 machine translation systems from 23 organizations, including the largest search services, Google, Yandex, and Bing. During the contest, texts were translated from and into English for several languages, including Russian. The quality of translation performed by the different systems was evaluated, utilizing both experts' opinions as well as automatic assessments. As a result, the PROMT technology was recognized as the very best one for the translation from English into Russian and also shared the first and the second places with another company in the category for the translation from English into German.

“The PROMT Company regularly participates in scientific conferences, seminars, and contests . We are constantly improving our machine translation software based on the latest scientific achievements and emerging technology. Because of this, we are always paying attention to the new trends and technology of statistical machine translation, and we also developed our own PROMT DeepHybrid technology using statistical techniques.”

- Alexander Molcahnov, Head of PROMT's Statistical Research Group

Throughout its history, the PROMT Company has continually received some of the highest accolades for its translation quality , including in the annual contests of the Computer Linguistics Association.

This year, Russian was included in the contest for the first time and became the leader by a number of represented systems. Materials from various online editions were used for the contest. As Russian sources, articles from “Argumenty i Facty”, “Izvestiya”, “Rosbalt”, “Vesti”, and “BBC Russian Service” were used.

“Our translation from and into Russian can be, indeed, called the best in the world. There are several reasons for this. First, as we have been developing and furthering this technology for many years, our products have continued to progress, absorbing all of the applicable technological advancements and innovations along the way. Secondly, our translations are “direct”, unlike some online services that use what is known as “cross translation”. That is, text from any language is, at first, translated into English, and only then into Russian. It is a widespread method of translation, but this method does not provide the quality of the direct translation.”

- Yulia Yepifantseva, PROMT's Development Director