Consider this sign in a Japanese subway station: "For restrooms, go back towards your behind."
To help reduce linguistic mistakes, Provo-based Lingotek created a language search engine at www.lingotek.com. The technology searches large collections of previously translated content for that which most closely matches the meaning of the sentences or phrases that need to be translated.
The approach increases the speed at which language professionals can produce accurate translations by 2,000 words a day up to 16,000 words a day, said Tim Hunt, Lingotek's founder and chief executive. The Web-based service helps translators find words faster, better and cheaper, he added.
"The World Wide Web isn't global if it's only in one language," said Hunt, who started Lingotek as TermSeek in January 2001.
Hunt honed his linguistic skills after spending 14 years supervising scripture translation for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and 11 years as both a soldier and officer in the 300th MI Linguistic Battalion of the Utah National Guard.
Having supervised translation in more than 85 languages, he developed a way of searching languages that allowed computers to identify the same words in the same context.
Originally from Oregon, Hunt came to Utah for a Mormon mission in 1980. He learned Vietnamese while helping refugees here and then got a bachelor's degree in Asian Studies at Brigham Young University.
He started Lingotek while getting his MBA at the University of Utah, where he also was an adjunct professor.
Helping to build seed money for the business, Hunt won $65,000 taking first place in both the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge in 2001 and Oregon's New Venture Championship in 2002.
In August 2005 the company moved its headquarters to Provo, to the Novell Open Source Technology Center. Provo City granted the company a $100,000 loan to expand operations and hire additional personnel.
To date, the company has raised about $3 million from investors. Its customers include international language service providers, freelance translators, universities and entities in the U.S. government.
"Lingotek's Web-based language translation tools allow us to turn around large documents in a matter of hours when it used to take days, and quality actually improves," said Tim Olds, managing director and co-founder of Verbatim Solutions, a language service provider with more than 2,000 international customers and 1,200 translators. "We feel that Lingotek is clearly in the early 'Google' stages and its free usage will only accelerate adoption, which we believe will cause shockwaves throughout the translation industry."
Although the Web site is free to the public, the business charges for some accounts and makes most of its money from government contracts, with much of that coming from Arabic translations tied to initiatives against suspected terrorists.
In February, Canopy Ventures of Lindon invested $1 million in Lingotek.
Brandon Tidwell, managing director of Canopy, said the company was attracted to Lingotek's service and promise.
"We're very excited about the company," Tidwell said. "We have a great deal of confidence in Mr. Hunt. I think Lingotek has a great deal of potential as far as the government agencies and military."
