Life Beyond Spellcheckers

With the launch of a translation tool this fall, Soft-Art hopes to duplicate from its new beachhead in Belgium the success it has enjoyed in the OEM market in the much larger retail software world.

Virtually all PC and Mac users have used the company’s software at one time or another but few will recognize its name: Soft-Art. This Florida company, which is not well, known and has consciously kept a low profile, has quietly become one of the major suppliers of linguistic software to the OEM market. Countless commercial developers have licensed Soft-Art’s hyphenation routines, spellcheckers, and electronic thesauri for incorporation within their software programs. More recently, the company has been doing substantial business in the handheld arena, with companies from the Far East signing up Soft-Art wordstock for implementation in the popular pocket translators and similar gadgets. However, with Trans-Linc, a multilingual thesaurus that will be launched this fall, Soft-Art is taking the bold step of entering the retail market itself rather than waiting for the traditional OEM customers to generate demand for such a product.

Soft-Art is located in the idyllic enclave of Marco Island, a quiet resort and retirement community about as far south as you can go on the western coast of Florida before running into the Everglades. Hot all the year round, air conditioners run constantly in this part of the us and people drink Coke for breakfast. Though Soft-Art was originally established in Antwerp, Janssens moved the company to Marco Island because his Belgian business partner Willy Verhaegen had a real estate business there. As such, Marco Island provided an ideal springboard for directing sales and marketing efforts at North American developers for the multilingual hyphenation routines the company was offering. Janssens says that at one time he might have considered moving the company to California to be closer to his OEM customers but he is now quite content to stay where he is; that their nearest customer is more than four hundred miles to the north doesn’t really matter.
    For the founder of a linguistic software company, Janssens’ credentials are impeccable. He studied at the University of Leuven — the source of so much Belgian computational linguistic expertise — and wrote his doctoral thesis on parsing Dutch. In the early 1980s, he was a member of the Belgian Eurotra team, before leaving for florida. As it enters its tenth year, Soft-Art gives all signs of flourishing. The company has assembled a team of expert linguists, it hasn’t a penny of debt, and it is embark, ing on an ambitious linguistic resource development program. Although it may not be quite what CEC ministers had in mind all those years ago, in Soft-Art, Eurotra has at least indirectly born commercial fruit. Paul Janssens may be Eurotra’s most successful graduate to date.

Lane Carder and his wife Patricia Carder joined Soft-Art as employees number three and four. Lane Carder, a soft, spoken retired Air Force pilot, came aboard as technical director; he worked previously at Samna Corp in Georgia, a longtime Soft-Art licensee. One of his responsibilities has been to adapt the Soft-Art materials for handheld devices. This process entails burning into an EPROM the compiled C code of the retrieval routines for the Zilog Z-80 chip upon which many of the handhelds are based. A note, worthy sight in his office at Soft-Art is a prototype of the Canon WordTank. Far from being the sleek, wallet-size device of the final production unit, this is an ungainly collection of breadboards, a bird’s nest of wires, and a rather large keyboard. With its two miniature IC card readers, the WordTank is one of the most advanced of the current generation of handheld electronic dictionaries. Canon offers a range of additional dictionaries based on Soft-Art materials in the IC card format. Multilingual dictionaries are just one of the possibilities for such handhelds; certainly other kinds of travel and reference information could be distributed in this format, and naturally Soft-Art is aware of this. While today’s Z80 chips require a careful balance between compression and speed and aren’t really suitable for ambitious applications, tomorrow’s low,voltage 386 chip might make some rudimentary NIP techniques and capabilities possible.
    Patricia Carder brought to Soft-Art formidable marketing skills gained through her experience in telephone sales at AT&T in Georgia. Janssens readily acknowledges her dri ve and keen understanding of corporate selling as being instrumental in Soft-Art’s success. While many high,tech startups are strong in the engineering and vision depart’ ments, not many will have someone of Patricia Carder’s capacities for the vital marketing and sales activities.

Soft-Art is about the only “industry” on Marco Island. Visiting the low, two-story building which houses it is a surprising experience because all of the twenty or so employees — with the exception of Brian Pfister and Lane Carder — are linguists and the cultural diversity makes the company seem like a United Nations in miniature. In an informal tour through the building, we were introduced to linguists from Russia, China, Argentina, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Italy, France, and Belgium, the latter being Paul Janssens’s wife, Annie Marie Jacob, who works on the Dutch projects. The receptionist, who Danish, proofreads texts between callers. Finding suitable candidates has been a challenge, but Janssens has maintained contacts in the academic world and still enjoys a good reputation there.
    Like other OEM suppliers in the linguistic software world, Soft-Art licenses materials from European sources. Not everything can be licensed (notably thesauri), though, and the licensed materials that the company does acquire need to be tested and integrated into Soft-Art’s formats. This is where Soft-Art’s team of linguists come in. How- ever, the company is setting its sights beyond the now firmly established spellchecker-hyphenator-thesaurus triad, and an ambitious development program is now underway to develop multilingual resources which can be used for a variety of applications, of which Trans-Linc is but one. In his office at Soft-Art, Janssens provides a brief glimpse of ‘the linguistic database. It is concept-oriented, he explains, with a given concept represented by a simple sentence in English demonstrating its use. Listed below this basic concept are equivalent terms in all the languages that Soft-Art linguists are currently working on. A fascinating aspect of the Soft-Art system is that as the linguists add terms in their native languages, they verify the entries added by their colleagues in a second language. The Soft-Art linguists have all studied at least two foreign languages and this enables them to assist each other. The Chinese linguist, for example, studied Russian in addition to English and can therefore help her Russian colleague check the Russian entries. As it currently stands, the Soft- Art database can be directly compiled as a multilingual thesaurus. But there are other uses for it as well. While Janssens won’t detail future plans, it is obvious that with the addition of syntactic and semantic information t he database could be a very useful resource for parsing, translation, or concept-based information retrieval, among other things.

Entering the retail software market is of course an ambitious move for a company which has flourished as an OEM supplier, but Janssens has been restructuring the organiza- tion to meet this new challenge. To start with, sales and marketing activities have been cleanly separated from development efforts, and have been brought under a separate company, called Linguistic Software Solutions, which Patricia Carder established last autumn and is now its president. As Carder explains, LSS is the exclusive sales representative for Soft-Art’s OEM customers; however, her company is entitled to look to third parties for materials which Soft-Art cannot supply, thereby ensuring customer loyalty .
    Janssens also turned to Willy Verhaegen, his long-time business partner, to set up a European beachhead for linguistic end-user products based on Soft- Art materials. Verhaegen is based in Antwerp and has established a company, Soft-Linc, expressly for marketing Trans-Linc worldwide. While Verhaegen has other ongoing business interests, he is clearly willing to invest considerable time in getting Soft-Lincoffthe ground. Verhaegen realizes that it will be a formidable challenge. The European software market is a difficult one, highly fragmented and without the kind of central distribution channels that make such efforts easier in the us. In addition, there are logistical problems which an OEM company never has to deal with. As Janssens’ former business partner and compatriot Rudy Montigny points out, packaging and distribution of end-user products brings with it big headaches, especially for a company coming from the much more differentlyorganized OEM world.

An experienced and genteel businessman, Verhaegen presents a refreshing change from the usual baby-faced wheeler-dealers prevalent in the computer industry. While he is not an expert on linguistic software, his ample business contacts will no doubt be extremely useful in marketing the Trans-Linc package, and this is probably what Soft- Linc needs the most at the moment. As Verhaegen readies the package for a tentative October European launch, he is defining a marketing strategy together with the firm Mind Press, a marketing consultancy in Temse, Belgium. One of the biggest decisions is how to package the product. Which language pairs should be bundled together for which countries? Dealers are unlikely to want to stock a dozen or more different Trans-Linc packages — at least not yet. Janssens and Verhaegen have been deliberating this matter, and accord- ing to Verhaegen, their current thinking is going in the direction of English and the respective local language for each country together with a coupon entitling buyers to receive an additional bidirectional language pair of their choice at no cost directly from Soft-Linc. This makes sense; most users will probably not be interested in more than two foreign language pairs, but it will be impossible to predict which two. As an added benefit, this arrangement will provide users with a strong incentive to register. As software houses know, a database of registered users is a very useful thing to have; there is lots of revenue to be generated with upgrades and enhancements. Naturally, the price is also crucial at this end of the market. Current thoughts are in the BFR10,000 (US$350) range for the basic bidirectional two-language package plus coupon.
    Soft-Art has forsaken the development of a DOS version of Trans-Linc and will embark directly into the GUI arena with Windows and Apple Macintosh versions of Trans-Linc. As amazing as it might seem, Trans-Linc is one of the very first — if not the first — translation tool for the Mac. The reasons for this lacuna are obscure, but it may be because the logical market for such programs is Europe, and Macs, until recently, have been very expensive here. It is ironic because the Mac was designed from the ground up with multilingual considerations in mind — look at how much easier it is to enter accented characters on the Mac than on the pc. The Mac enjoys a slight preference at Soft-Art. While the linguists — from Janssens on down all work on PCs running DOS, Brian Pfister, the in-house programmer, is a Mac devotee who implemented Trans-Linc on the Mac first before he turned to Windows.
    Trans-Linc is similar to the package Euroglot (See  sidebar ), developed by Linguistic Systems of Nijmegen (the Netherlands). It is concept rather than entry-based and you can easily jump between languages. Like Euroglot, Trans-Linc also has a full verb conjugation module and a user dictionary. Unlike Euroglot, however, it offers a root analyzer that makes looking up a word directly from your word processor easier. Although a multilingual thesaurus may seem vague in concept, in practice it is a tremendous tool for writing in a foreign language, where your passive knowledge of the language may be far larger than your active vocabulary. In the final tally, however, the ultimate utility of such programs depends largely on the size of their lexicons. At this point, we won’t hazard a guess which package is larger but we do hope that in the spirit of enlightened competition both companies will continue to expand the size of their offerings. Regardless of this particular issue, Janssens and Verhaegen, like Linguistic Systems’ Leo Konst before them, realize that the real market for such tools is not with professional translators but rather with the international business market. Professional translators already have a substantial basic vocabulary for the languages that they are translating to and from. If anything, they are looking for help with terminology or help with highly unusual usages; neither Trans-Linc nor Euroglot can help much here, unless users import terminology lists. Businesses and organizations producing large volumes of informal docu- mentation (correspondence, etc.) in foreign languages are the real market for writing tools like Trans-Linc. The language learning market also has potential, but here the price tag of Trans-Linc will probably be too high.

While Marco Island may be a long way from the action, Willy Verhaegen in Antwerp is sitting right at the center of multilingual Europe. The initial offerings of Trans-Linc will include English (American and British), German, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian. Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish will follow in November, while Portuguese, Greek, Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Polish will be ready at the beginning of 1994. Soft-Art also has an electronic version of the Longman dictionary that it developed for the OEM market which it would also like to deploy and the company is considering offering it as a Trans-Linc add-on. While ethnocentric Americans may not be interested in the Longman, this British dictionary does enjoy — as Verhaegen is aware — an excellent reputation in Europe. Many copies of the paper edition, it might be added, were seen in Soft-Art’s offices; it is also a linguist’s staple tool of the trade. ”I believe that multilingualdictionaries will be the next major wordprocessor add,on,” says Paul Janssens optimistic’ ally. “It took three years for thesauri to take off, but now they’re standard with every wordprocessor. When dictionaries reach that stage, we’ll also be ready.”

Soft-Art, 992 Winterberry Drive, Marco Island, FL 33937, USA; Tel + 1 813 394 8300, Fax + 1 813 394 6485

Linguistic Software Solutions, 606 Bald Eagle Drive, Marco Island, FL 33937, USA; Tel + 1 813 642 6010, Fax + 1 813 642 5774

Soft-Linc, Mechelsesteenweg 148, B,2650, Belgium; Tel +32 3 454 0 454, Fax +32 3 454 0 436