Language Weaver

 
Language Weaver is the machine translation (MT) technology and brand of RWS. The brand name was revived in 2021 following the acquisition SDL and Iconic Translation Machines Ltd and the merging of the respective teams and technologies. Language Weaver was formerly a standalone company that was acquired by SDL in 2010.
History.
Language Weaver was a Los Angeles, California–based company founded in 2002 by Kevin Knight and Daniel Marcu from the University of Southern California. The company was founded to commercialise a statistical approach to automatic language translation and natural language processing known as statistical machine translation (SMT). 
Language Weaver’s statistical approach to machine translation was cutting-edge at the time, and a significant improvement previous approaches such as Rule-Based MT. Rule-based MT relied on collections of linguistic rules to analyse source sentences, and then map the syntactic and semantic structure into the target language. Language Weaver used statistical techniques from cryptography, applying machine learning algorithms that automatically acquire statistical models from existing parallel collections of human translations. These models are more likely to be up to date, appropriate and idiomatic, because they are learned directly from real translations. 
SMT was once thought appropriate only for languages with very large amounts of pre-translated data. However, with advances in SMT technology Language Weaver was able to pioneer the creation of translation systems for languages with smaller amounts of parallel data. Additionally, with customisation, SMT could also "learn" to accurately translate highly technical material.
Language Weaver grew a steadily over an 8 year period, with staff numbers totalling 96 across offices in US, Europe, and Japan. The company had significant business with Government organisations where its name continues to hold strong recognition to this day.
In July 2010, Language Weaver was acquired by SDL plc for $42.5 million and the company was renamed SDL Language Weaver.
SDL Language Weaver.
SDL Language Weaver was the primary machine translation technology at SDL where, over time, it evolved from SMT to syntax-based MT, to Neural Machine Translation. The Language Weaver brand was retired in 2015 in favour of SDL BeGlobal for the cloud-based solution, and SDL Enterprise Translation Server for the on-premise solution. Later, these products were rebranded again as SDL Machine Translation Cloud and SDL Machine Translation Edge respectively.
2021 Relaunch.
The Language Weaver brand was revived in 2021 following the acquisition of SDL by RWS, and the merger of the SDL MT and Iconic Translation Machines teams and technologies. The combined technologies of both companies, based on state-of-the-art Transformer-based Neural Machine Translation, are now sold as "Language Weaver" for cloud-based MT, and "Language Weaver Edge" for on-premise MT. 