Language Weaver, a machine translation (MT) software developer, has announced a $4 million VC infusion. This is just another sign that MT is inching closer to real-world/commercial applications.

Slowly but surely we're seeing companies make limited use of MT to translate text that would have been cost-prohibitive to translate manually. SDL recently launched such a service.

I'm not suggesting that MT is anywhere near replacing human translators. In fact, the better way to look at MT software is like desktop publishing software - it did not replace designers, but it did give them the tools to help them do their jobs more effeciently.

Here is the full press release:

LANGUAGE WEAVER RAISES $4 MILLION IN SERIES B FUNDING -All major Series A

investors reinvest in round led by Palisades Ventures -

LOS ANGELES - Oct. 6, 2004 - Language Weaver, Inc., a Los Angeles-based

software company developing statistical machine translation software (SMTS),

today announced it has completed the initial closing of its Series B funding

round of $4 million. The round was led by Palisades Ventures of Los Angeles.

Palisades Ventures is a venture capital fund making growth stage investments

in systems, services, software, and hardware companies driving the adoption

of leading edge information technology, communications, and media

technologies. Paul D'Addario, senior managing director of Palisades

Ventures, will take a seat on the Language Weaver board of directors.

"Palisades Ventures invests in companies with strong technologies, proven

market traction, and where we can leverage our many strategic relationships

in the IT, communications and media sectors for the benefit of our portfolio

companies," D'Addario said. "Language Weaver's translation technology has

immense commercial potential. The company will be well supported by

Palisades Ventures with introductions to potential customers and strategic

partners as it positions itself in the commercial markets."

Palisades Ventures first became aware of Language Weaver at LARTA

Institute's Los Angeles Venture Forum in April 2004 where Language Weaver

was chosen as start-up company of the year. In addition to Palisades

Ventures, all of Language Weaver's major Series A investors have also chosen

to invest in the Series B round, including Sulphur Creek Ventures and

Athenaeum Fund.

According to Bryce Benjamin, CEO of Language Weaver, the money will be used

to support the company's entrance into commercial markets. "The obvious

first mover for Language Weaver's technology was the government, where we

have now established several contracts and excellent relationships,"

Benjamin said. "With this new investment we will grow our team and expand

our marketing and sales efforts into the international and domestic

commercial markets, which are hundreds of times larger than the government

markets and where the need is even greater for high quality language

translation."

About Language Weaver

Language Weaver was founded in 2002 to commercialize a unique approach to

automatic language translation using proprietary statistical translation

algorithms that resulted from 20 person-years of invention and development

at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute

(USC/ISI). Its resulting product, statistical machine translation software,

provides the highest quality output to date from machine translation. The

company has 15 patents pending on its SMTS technology. Bidirectional

language pairs available include: Arabic/English, Chinese/English,

French/English, and Spanish/English; unidirectional languages include Somali

to English and Hindi to English, with others coming soon. Language Weaver's

software is available as licensed software in client server and stand-alone

versions. Website: www.languageweaver.com.

-end-