SDL and Language Weaver today announced a strategic partnership in which SDL becomes the primary sales channel for Language Weaver’s statistical machine translation (SMT) software in the commercial market. Language Weaver will continue selling to government entities and OEM-oriented partners.

Under the terms of the agreement, SDL will integrate Language Weaver’s SMT engine into its freetranslation.com website, the current version of its SDL TMS translation management system (TMS), a future CEAF-based version of its Trados translation memory suite, and with its Knowledge-based Translation Server (KbTS) initiatives. The SMT engine already works with SDL WorldServer due to an earlier partnership between Language Weaver and Idiom, developer of WorldServer. The companies did not reveal financial details.

• SDL targets commercial accounts while Language Weaver focuses on government. CEO Mark Tapling told us that Language Weaver will funnel all go-to-market efforts for future commercial prospects to SDL, including customer care, product documentation, and online publishing. The two companies anticipate increasing demand for user-generated content (UGC) translation, so online communities can share knowledge and communicate more easily.
• The partners anticipate serving up a mix of human and machine translation. SDL’s Director of Product Marketing Sophie Hurst figures that the joint solution will allow customers with high volumes of untranslated support articles to implement a mixed translation model: The top five percent could be human translated, the next 20 percent might use the company’s KbTS services, with the remaining, rarely-accessed content translated using the MT engines alone. 
• The SDL offering will meld its languages with those of Language Weaver. SDL’s machine translation focus has been on French, Italian, German, and Spanish (FIGS) and Nordic languages, while Language Weaver has devoted energy to a more esoteric mix of tongues, some driven by government needs in the Middle East and Asia. While SDL could have extended its MT engine on its own, perfecting new language pairs in a rules-based system takes time. This agreement adds a quiver of interesting languages to SDL’s products — plus the ability to create new pairs quickly and inexpensively.
• Customers will get a single point of contact. Language Weaver has already begun training SDL marketing, sales, and professional services staff. Executives extolled plans to integrate the products and support delivery so well that, according to Tapling, “customers will get just one butt to kick.” Incomplete integration and finger-pointing between partners is a frequent complaint that customers have with such partnerships, so bilateral executive attention will be a critical success factor.

This partnership is a win-win for both companies. SDL gets new SMT technology to upgrade its oft-updated but long-in-the-tooth rules-based MT engine (RBMT), while government-centric Language Weaver gains a commercial sales channel without having to build out its own expensive sales force. While it’s not the hybrid SMT-RBMT technology that we predicted in our 2006 “Automated Translation Technology” report, this approach melds two engines with mainstream and emerging-marktet languages into SDL’s product line. Customers will benefit from the broader palette of languages and integrated workflow. With MT use set to climb steadily in the coming years, SDL is now positioned to ride the tiger.

But by partnering with Language Weaver rather than acquiring it, SDL may have only caught the tiger by its tail. Partnering for strategically important software is terra incognita for SDL, a company known for its autarkic approach to the market and its appetite for outright acquisition (Trados, Tridion, PASS, Idiom, and Trisoft in the last four years). The big “if” in this announcement is whether SDL has learned how to partner rather than just acquire. Are the two companies ready to make the partnership a success? If so, they must maintain the energy with which they’ve launched the relationship, avoiding the all-too-frequent journey to the land of unsustained Barney relationships. However, we do find positive signs of a partner-ready SDL; for example, Hurst told us that SDL’s partner program now has 15 relationships initiated or announced. So maybe SDL has turned that corner — only time and action will tell.

This partnership will upset the competitive dynamics in the TMS software sector and among larger language service providers. Lionbridge and Translations.com largely ignored the Idiom and Tridion acquisitions because they saw those deals as net positive for themselves. This partnership is different. It creates uncertainty for SDL’s largest competitors, and even for mid-sized companies like euroscript, Moravia, and thebigword. Now, Lionbridge must work double-time to assure its super-sized customers that MT is just as much at home in the Freeway model as in the big-iron TMS implementations based on SDL translation technologies. And all of sudden, the mid-sized players look smaller again. Dangerously disruptive, the Language Weaver technology integration makes SDL’s product line much more compelling for big-picture-thinking, big-spending enterprise translation buyers.