SYSTRAN
'''SYSTRAN''', founded by Dr. [[Peter Toma]] in [[1968]]<ref>Systran: Past and Present - http://pages.unibas.ch/LIlab/staff/tenhacken/Applied-CL/3_Systran/3_Systran.html#history</ref>, is one of the oldest [[machine translation]] companies. SYSTRAN has done extensive work for the [[United States Department of Defense]] and the [[European Commission]]. 

SYSTRAN provides the technology for [[Yahoo!]] and [[AltaVista]]'s ([[Babel Fish (website)|Babel Fish]]) among others, but use of it was ended (circa 2007) for all of the language combinations offered by [[Google]]'s [[List of Google products#anchor_language_tools|language tools]]<ref>Google Switches to Its Own Language System, ''Google Operating System'', October 2007</ref>. 

Commercial versions of SYSTRAN operate with operating systems [[Microsoft Windows]] (including [[Windows Mobile]]), [[Linux]] and [[Solaris (operating system)|Solaris]].

== History ==

With its origin in the [[Georgetown-IBM experiment|Georgetown]] machine translation effort, SYSTRAN was one of the few machine translation systems to survive the major decrease of funding after the [[ALPAC|ALPAC Report]] of the mid-1960's.  The company was established in [[La Jolla, San Diego, California|La Jolla]], [[California]] to work on translation of Russian to English text for the [[United States Air Force]] during the "[[Cold War]]". Large numbers of Russian scientific and technical documents were translated using SYSTRAN under the auspices of the USAF Foreign Technology Division (later the National Air and Space Intelligence Center) at [[Wright-Patterson Air Force Base]], Ohio. The quality of the translations, although only approximate, was usually adequate for understanding content.

The company was sold during 1986 to the Gachot family, based in [[Paris]], [[France]], and is now  traded publicly by the French stock exchange.  It has a main office at the [[Grande Arche]] in [[La Defense]] and maintains a secondary office in [[La Jolla, San Diego, California]].

== Languages ==

Here is a list of the source and target languages SYSTRAN works with.
Many of the pairs are to or from English or French.

* Russian into English (1968)
* English into Russian (1973) for the [[Apollo-Soyuz]] project
* English source (1975) for the [[European Commission]]
* Arabic
* Chinese
* Danish
* Dutch
* French
* German
* Greek
* Hindi
* Italian
* Japanese
* Korean
* Norwegian
* Serbo-Croatian
* Spanish
* Swedish
* Persian
* Polish
* Portuguese
* Ukrainian
* Urdu

==See also==
* [[Comparison of Machine translation applications]]

==External links==
* [http://www.systransoft.com/PastPresent.html SYSTRAN website]

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== References ==
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[[Category:Machine translation]]

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