A Russian software company develops machine
translation (MT) technologies. It produces
and sells integrated solutions for formatted
text translation to/from almost all European
languages. These solutions include support
for such applications as Microsoft Outlook
(e-mail translation), Microsoft Internet
Explorer, etc.
Key Problems
The company developed the Internet Translation
Server for Windows intended for text and
URL translations via Internet/intranet.
Windows-specific functionality problems
and the desire to attract the Unix-using
customers forced the company to start developing
the Unix-based version of the Internet Translation
Server. However, since the company was concentrating
on Windows software development, it was
not staffed with the Unix specialists.The
company considered it unreasonable to hire
an expensive Unix team for a limited-time
project only. So, the decision to outsource
the project to Arcadia,
Inc. was achieved. A long-term relationship
between Arcadia, Inc.
and this company had started earlier, when
the Arcadia, Inc.
team had implemented the translation system
on Macintosh.
Arcadia, Inc.
Solution
Arcadia, Inc.
team developed the Internet Translation
Server for Unix, which included porting
of the translation engines from the Windows
version. The Internet Translation Server
provides the web interfaces both for plain
text translation and for translation of
the Internet resources specified by URLs.
Porting of the translation engines was performed
in order to maintain the single source code
for both versions and to share the same
linguistic database. All other components
of the system were rewritten using the best
Unix-specific approaches.
Employed technologies: Linux, GNU
C++, TCP/IP, Apache, Perl. Duration: 12 months or 36
person/months. Location of work: St. Petersburg,
Russia.
