L&H boosts language offerings with acquisitions
By Jana Sanchez-Klein
InfoWorld Electric
Posted at 11:17 AM PT, Jul 22, 1998
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) has acquired three companies that will broaden its range of language translation offerings
and speed up the launch of new products and services, the company's president and CEO Gaston Bastiaens said.
The Belgian speech and linguistic technology company announced on Monday that it had signed an agreement to
acquire Globalink, in Fairfax, Va. Globalink offers computer-based language translations for e-mail, the Internet, Web
content, and chat. Lernout & Hauspie will acquire Globalink in an all-stock deal of $5.60 per share of Globalink's
outstanding common stock. With approximately 12.7 million shares outstanding, the total price for the deal equals
approximately 1.2 million shares of L&H stock, according to the company's statement.
Lernout & Hauspie also acquired Tokyo-based AlLogic and NeocorTech of San Diego, both providers of machine
translation technology for Asian languages, it announced Monday. AILogic's products include E-Jbank, an
English-to-Japanese machine translation software for PCs. NeocorTech provides machine translation, e-mail, and
Web translation software for Windows NT and other server platforms. AlLogic was bought for $5.5 million in cash;
Neocor was picked up for $1 million in cash.
For L&H the deals bring it nine more language pairs that it can use in its various translation and voice recognition
products. "We suddenly have more than 15 different language pairs," said Bastiaens. "It would have taken us a couple
of years to develop those language pairs. It has shortened the time to market for our product by two years."
The new language pairs L&H acquired are English/Japanese, Japanese/Chinese, English/Chinese, English/Italian,
English/Brazilian Portuguese, French/German, Italian/French, Italian/Spanish and English/Russian. L&H already had
English/German, English/French, English/Arabic, English/Spanish, Russian/German and English/Korean.
The most immediate use for the new language pairs will be in the company's new Internet-based machine translation
service, called iTranslator, which it will launch around October. The new service allows clients, for a monthly
subscription fee, to submit text via the Internet for machine translation.
The service can translate up to 10 or 15 pages of text per minute (depending upon connection speed) with 85 percent
accuracy, Bastiaens said. The company expects the service to be used by professionals in the financial and information
markets. "Machine translation is not perfect, but we are targeting a quality of 85 percent. At such a quality, you can
read and understand the information. We also have human translators online, an additional service to dot the i's and
cross the t's."
The language pairs will also be used in intelligent search systems for the Internet and other L&H products.
The company will integrate all three acquisitions into its Language Technology Division, the division that develops
machine translation, Internet translation, and all artificial intelligent technologies including data mining and information
management tools. With the Globalink acquisition, L&H also gained retail translation products, e-commerce translation
business, and access to Globalink's multinational customer base, the company said.
The AlLogic and Neocor integration will happen immediately, Bastiaens said, but the Globalink acquisition will require
shareholder and U.S. Federal Communications Commission approval, which should happen within a few months.
Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products Inc., in Leper, Belgium, can be reached at lhs.com.
Jana Sanchez-Klein is London bureau chief for the IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate. |
