Service: custom software development
Solution type: web application
Business area: internet, machine translation (MT)
Client: A Russian software company developing machine translation (MT) technologies. The company 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.
Period: 2002
Key problems
The Client developed 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 Client was concentrating on Windows software development, it was not staffed with the Unix specialists. The Client considered it unreasonable to hire an expensive Unix team for a limited-time project. Thus, the decision to outsource the project to Arcadia, ZAO was achieved. A long-term relationship between Arcadia, ZAO and the Client started earlier, when Arcadia's team implemented the translation system on Macintosh.
Solution
Arcadia's team developed the Internet Translation Server for Unix, which included porting of the translation engines from the Windows version. The Internet Translation Server provided 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 re-written using the best Unix-specific approaches.
Technologies used
- Linux
- GNU C
- TCP/IP
- Apache
- Perl
Duration and scope
12 months / ~36 person-months