Acquisition of Language Weaver Inc
July 15 2010 - 2:00AM
UK Regulatory
TIDMSDL
RNS Number : 3903P
SDL PLC
15 July 2010
SDL Acquires Language Weaver, Affirming its Leadership in Machine Translation
and Global Information Management
Maidenhead, United Kingdom - 15th July 2010 - SDL, the leading provider of
Global Information Management solutions, today announces it has signed an
agreement to acquire Language Weaver Inc. ("Language Weaver"), a pioneer in
statistical machine translation. This acquisition not only delivers
best-of-breed automated translation technology into SDL's Global Information
Management Platform, it does much more. Integration of secure machine
translation technology into the translation supply chain at all levels will
allow enterprises and governments to translate significantly larger volumes of
content faster and more efficiently to meet the needs of the vast content in
today's increasingly online world. The transaction has received shareholder
approval of more than 85% of Language Weaver equity ownership and is expected to
complete before the end of July, 2010.
SDL is acquiring Language Weaver for a consideration of US$42.5 million (GBP28.2
million) in cash, subject to adjustments for closing working capital and cash
positions, with target cash in the business of US$4m. The consideration is being
satisfied using SDL's existing cash resources. Language Weaver had unaudited
turnover of US$12.2 million for calendar year ending 2009 with an unaudited
pre-tax loss of $1.0 million. The deal will be earnings dilutive in 2011, due
primarily to the amortization of intangibles created through the acquisition.
Language Weaver is expected to be earnings enhancing thereafter. The business
will be acquired on a debt free basis. Unaudited gross assets at the end of
calendar year 2009 were $9.3 million.
The amount of content available through the web today has increased dramatically
and includes marketing content, manuals and support content as well as user
generated content such as blogs, tweets. The need for people to read this vast
amount of content in their own language is greater than the availability of
human translators.Machine translation, as part of an overall strategy for
creating and managing multilingual content, is the solution to that problem. The
acquisition of Language Weaver's machine translation technology puts SDL firmly
in place for ensuring the effective provision of secure multilingual content
into the future's digital age through:
· Language Weaver's success in government, combined with SDL's blue chip
client portfolio and their collaboration with the translation community
· SDL's leadership in content and language technology solutions, combined
with Language Weaver's authority in machine translation technology
The two companies have several joint customers, such as Adobe, Dell, Intel and
Siemens and have tightly integrated their products to support both high-quality
machine translation stand alone, as in combination with human translation.
Language Weaver's customer base includes enterprises such as TripAdvisor, who
use the technology to provide instant translations of community reviews of
hotels and restaurants. Language Weaver's portfolio also includes government
agencies around the world. One example is the solution developed with Raytheon
BBN, a Language Weaver partner, that enables clients to scan through local
country news, broadcasts, and web content to gain intelligence insights by
analyzing multilingual open-source communications around the world.
Language Weaver is headquartered in Los Angeles, California, and operates in the
United States, Europe and Japan, employing 96 staff. The company works closely
with the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern
California, a leading research institute for machine translation, to further
research and enhance statistical machine translation methods through the
combined parties' scientists. The founders of Language Weaver, Daniel Marcu and
Kevin Knight, both leaders in the field of Statistical Machine Translation will
stay in the business. More recently Mark Tapling was brought in as CEO to
further commercialize the business since the quality and performance of the
Language Weaver technology had reached new levels. Mark Tapling will also stay
with the business. There are no plans to make any redundancies in the Language
Weaver business.
"Only a small percentage of content is translated today," said Mark Lancaster,
Chairman and CEO of SDL. "The digital universe is set to rise 10 fold in the
next five years and this expansion will be across the globe. Research has proved
that internet users are significantly more likely to read and react to content
in their own language. However there are simply not enough translators in the
world to translate the text we need in local language at the speed and
quantities required. We believe machine translation will become an integral
part of companies' content creation and management strategy. Within the next 5
years we expect over 30% of all translated content to utilize machine
translation in the process of translating one Language to another. We regard
Language Weaver as the best-in-class machine translation technology available in
the world today. Integrating secure and customized machine translation
technology into SDL's Global Information Management technology stack positions
SDL well to support our customers in creating global content in the future."
"While Google Translate has set the standard for ad-hoc translations by
consumers, we have found that most enterprises want to own their automated
translation technology," said Mark Tapling, President and CEO of Language
Weaver. "When using Language Weaver, your content remains secure and
confidential; it follows a workflow for translation and easily integrates into
your other systems. It can also provide quality ranking and trained systems so
that you have a trusted level of quality that respects things like corporate
branding rules and consistency of translations. The Language Weaver R&D team has
continuously pushed the boundaries in statistical machine translation research
while developing human communication solutions for enterprises and governments.
The SDL acquisition significantly expands Language Weaver's ability to address
the problem sets that the team tackles, to bring to market unique high-value
machine translation products and solutions."
Mark Tapling went on to say, "The combination of our technology and SDL's
translation and content management technologies gives enterprises a unique
opportunity to intensify their engagement with prospects and customers. This is
very much in line with SDL's vision of Global Information Management."
Today, automated translation only represents around 1% of the total translation
market (estimated at $10 to $15 billion - source IDC), but market analysts
expect that both the total market, as well as the market share of automated
translation will continue to grow at a substantial rate. SDL has seen that
automated translation allows its customers to lower translation costs by 30% to
50%, while at the same time cutting time-to-market for translated content by
more than 50%.
To learn more about the acquisition and the benefits of automated translation,
we invite you to join us for a webinar on July 20th, 2010 at 16:00 BST (UK Time)
/17:00 CET/11:00 EST/ 08:00 PDT. This is a free webinar but registration is
required.
For more information on the acquisition please visit www.sdl.com/languageweaver
-ends-
Contacts:
+-----------------------------------------+---------------------+
| SDL plc | Tel: 01628 410 127 |
+-----------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Mark Lancaster, Chief Executive | |
+-----------------------------------------+---------------------+
| John Hunter, Chief Financial Officer | |
+-----------------------------------------+---------------------+
| | |
+-----------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Financial Dynamics | Tel: 020 7831 3113 |
+-----------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Juliet Clarke/Haya Herbert-Burns/Ed | |
| Bridges | |
+-----------------------------------------+---------------------+
This information is provided by RNS
The company news service from the London Stock Exchange
END
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