Slate Rocks LLC

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Slate Rocks LLC

The assistive translation standard
ISIN	🆔
Predecessor	Precision Translation Tools
Founded 📆	2010 (2010)
Founder 👔
Headquarters 🏙️	, Homosassa, Florida , United States of America
Number of locations	3
Area served 🗺️	Global
Products 📟	SlateMT software
Services	Prepackaged Software
Members
Number of employees
🌐 Website	www.slate.rocks
📇 Address
📞 telephone

Slate Rocks (from tranSLATE) is an American software company developing cross-platform machine translation (MT) applications. It is a Florida Limited Liability Company with offices in Florida and Georgia, USA and Bangkok, Thailand.

History

Slate Rocks began as Precision Translation Tools in Thailand in 2010. The founders believed the then-new statistical machine translation (SMT) technology was an ideal foundation for the next generation of MT desktop applications.

The Thailand company released the first desktop application with SMT in 2012. DoMT (for "do machine translation") was limited to the Linux operating system because the underlying open source tools did not run on the Windows operating system. Over the next 4 years, the company achieved sufficient commercial sales to pursue a Windows-compatible product. However, by late 2014, Thailand's political instability motivated the company to relocate to Singapore under the same name. The Singaporean company spearheaded a development project to update the underlying open source tools to run on Windows and renamed the company’s brand "Slate."

After developing the Windows-capable open source tools, the Singapore company sponsored an Indiegogo campaign in late 2015. The campaign’s 53 backers and $13,000 fundraising demonstrated the market potential for a desktop SMT application. In February 2016, the company released Slate Desktop Edition as the world’s first SMT application to run on the Windows desktop and MT connectors for various computer-assisted translation tools. However, the prolonged development period stressed two of the Singaporean company’s three founding shareholders and they abandoned the company. The company’s only non-shareholder debts were its legal expenses. The attorney agreed to accept the company’s intellectual properties in exchange for striking the debt.

In September 2017, the new copyright owner and the original founder from seven years before founded Slate Rocks LLC in the United States. The new name was chosen to be consistent with the product brand.

Technologies

SlateMT applications use statistical machine translation technologies with rule-based pre- and post-processing. Together, the rules-based and statistical technologies give users a hybrid machine translation technology experience.

SlateMT applications blend open source and proprietary licensed software components to create user-friendly applications. The open source components include MGIZA++, Moses, GNU utilities, Perl runtime and Python runtime and libraries. The proprietary components are written in the Python language and distributed as editable source code under an end-user license agreement (EULA).

SlateMT applications are cross-platform. That is, they run on Windows, Linux and MacOS (coming soon). They include menu-driven user options to convert translation memories into statistical machine translation engines on all supported operating systems. They also include options to copy engines from one operating system to another. Engines created on one operating system can be copied to and run on other operating systems under the EULA terms.

Once created, the engines automatically become MT providers available through popular computer-assisted translation tools. Translators receive suggestions from the engine in the same way they might receive suggestions from other MT providers, like Google Translate or KantanMT. They can choose to accept the suggestion and edit its errors when necessary, or they can choose to reject the suggestion and create their own translation. The objective is the cycle to proofread and edit the suggestions should be more productive than translating without the technology assistance.

Strategies

The quality of MT technologies prior to SMT was generally inadequate for daily professional use. SMT technology promised better quality. Technology vendors exercised a strategy to implement Internet-based SMT applications with ease and convenience for non-professionals at the expense of optimal linguistic quality for professionals. Although the Internet applications are easy to use and often deliver better quality than older technologies, the new Internet applications created customer privacy/confidentiality problems. Desktop SMT applications offer alternatives to the Internet-based applications that resolve the dichotomy between MT quality and privacy.

Languages

Slate products supports 33 languages (list sorted alphabetically in English). They may be combined in any combination with customers' translation memories (e.g., en-fr, de-bg or zh-he), thus constituting support for 1,056 possible language pairs.

• Arabic (ar)
• Bulgarian (bg)
• Catalan (ca)
• Chinese (zh)
• Croatian (hr)
• Czech (cs)
• Danish (da)
• Dutch (nl)
• English (en)
• Estonian (et)
• Finnish (fi)
• French (fr)
• German (de)
• Greek (el)
• Hebrew (he)
• Hindi (hn)
• Hungarian (hu)
• Icelandic (is)
• Irish (ga)
• Italian (it)
• Japanese (ja)
• Korean (ko)
• Latvian (lv)
• Lithuanian (lt)
• Polish (pl)
• Portuguese (pt)
• Romanian (ro)
• Russian (ru)
• Slovak (sk)
• Slovenian (sl)
• Spanish (es)
• Swedish (sv)
• Tamil (ta)

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This article "Slate Rocks" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Slate Rocks. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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