Global Enterprises to Capitalize on Near Perfect Russian to English Machine Translation as SDL Sets New Industry Standard

MAIDENHEAD, UK – SDL (LSE: SDL), a leader in global content management, translation and digital experience, today announced that its next-generation SDL Neural Machine Translation (NMT) 2.0 has mastered Russian to English translation, one of the toughest linguistic Artificial Intelligence (AI) problems to date.

SDL NMT 2.0 outperformed all industry standards, setting a benchmark for Russian to English machine translation, with over 90% of the system’s output labelled as perfect by professional Russian-English translators. The new SDL NMT 2.0 Russian engine is being made available to enterprise customers via SDL Enterprise Translation Server (ETS), a secure NMT product, enabling organizations to translate large volumes of information into multiple languages.

“One of the toughest linguistic challenges facing the machine translation community has been overcome by the SDL team,” said Adolfo Hernandez, CEO, SDL. “It was the Russian language that first inspired the science and research behind machine translation, and since then it has always been a major challenge for the community. SDL has deployed breakthrough research strategies to master these difficult languages, and support the global expansion of its enterprise customers. We have pushed the boundaries and raised the performance bar even higher, and we are now paving the way for leadership in other complex languages.”

The linguistic properties and intricacies of the Russian language relative to English make it particularly challenging for MT systems to model. Russian is a highly inflected language with different syntax, grammar, and word order compared to English. Given the complexities created by these differences between the Russian and English language, raising the translation quality has been an ongoing focus of the SDL Machine Learning R&D team.

“With over 15 years of research and innovation in machine translation, our scientists and engineers took up the challenge to bring Neural MT to the next level,” said Samad Echihabi, Head of Machine Learning R&D, SDL. “We have been evolving, optimizing and adapting our neural technology to deal with highly complex translation tasks such as Russian to English, with phenomenal results. A machine running SDL NMT 2.0 can now produce translations of Russian text virtually indistinguishable from what Russian-English bilingual humans can produce.”

SDL NMT 2.0 is optimized for both accuracy and fluency and provides a powerful paradigm to deal with morphologically rich languages. It has been designed to adapt to the quality and quantity of the data it is trained on leading to high learning efficiency. SDL NMT 2.0 is also developed with the enterprise in mind with a significant focus on translation production speed and user control via terminology support.

Powered by SDL NMT 2.0, SDL Enterprise Translation Server (ETS) transforms the way global enterprises understand, communicate, collaborate and do business enabling them to securely translate and deliver large volumes of content into one or more languages quickly. Offering total control and security of translation data, SDL ETS has been successfully used in the government sector as well for over a decade.