Interview with Mark Tapling, new CEO of Language Weaver
Language Weaver now has Mark Tapling as its CEO, with a strong vision of where to take the company. Meanwhile Asia Online in Bangkok, helmed by Dion Wiggins, is stepping up to the starting line in the SMT stakes. Potential users of the technology will now have even more questions to ask about the real benefits and risks of the fast-growing translation industry.
"I think the usually-quoted size of the machine translation market at $100 million reflects the market's perception of the industry of current solutions," says Mark Tapling, the brand new CEO of Language Weaver, the statistical machine translation (SMT) solutions provider. "Conservative estimates are a function of the perceived limits of the technology."
Tapling took up his new function this week in Language Weaver's HQ in Marina del Rey in California. He has a strong IT business background in taking advanced software applications to market in sectors ranging from mobile devices to the hospitality sector. And he intends to continue to push the application envelope at Language Weaver.
His ambition is to make Language Weaver the ubiquitous provider of automated translation spftware for a wide variety of end users. This will involove working with OEM partners to build translation applications into products and with direct customers who buy the software, while delivering on-demand translation Software-as-a-Service to other customers over the web.
Tapling reckons Language Weaver has the required clout to become the high value-add partner that enterprises will need for their global requirements. "We have 160 person years of R&D behind us. The company is running at an operating profit, has an international distribution organization, and an outsourcing team dedicating to training MT systems in Europe."
"Traditionally MT for both vendors and customers has been a noisy space, packed with passionate but fragmented efforts and opinions. We need to corral all this fissile energy into a more mainstream mareketing drive, based around competing on translation quality."
When it comes to real competition, Mark Tapling sees very little on the horizon. "These systems are very hard to build, and new players will have to pick a single dimension or region as an entry market." He reckons there is no such competitor as 'free translation' on the web: "it's always paid for somewhere, and if the ad revenue dries up, so will the MT service. Free services ultimately become demand drivers for high quality translation applications."
TAUS Members can download the TAUS Report on Language Weaver