Translate whole pages in a single click! Miracle-workers Systran can be traced to Soissy-sous-Montmorency where its young Greek director Dimitrios Sabatakis is in charge of managing the world leader in automatic translation on the Internet (99% market share).
Systran products provides instant translation for 30 languages (60 will be available by the end of 2001) in a process used by the largest Websites. "We translate nearly 4 million pages a day" announced the Chairman who took over the company in 1993.... with no prior knowledge of the business sector in question.
Systran was founded thirty years ago in La Jolla in the United States by a Hungarian professor with invaluable experience in the "intelligence services" (US air force, FBI, etc.) before offering his services in Europe. Taken over by Jean Gachot, an industrialist in the Val d’Oise, Systran’s offer was too far ahead of the market to be profitable. This is where Dimitrios Sabatakakis came in. Jean Gachot’s son-in-law already had extensive business experience. He had previously been responsible for the rapid turnaround of the Gachot business (suppliers of industrial valves for the chemical industry) and sold the business at a profit. This left Systran, thought by the young Greek to be something of "a joke" but he neverthless decided to cultivate it...in a regal style. Within a few weeks he had overhauled its corporate strategy, signed an agreement with Louis Monier, the founder of Alta Vista, launched an offer on the Internet... and went from being a software publishing company to Internet service provider.
The big bang in international documentation has resulted in positive new prospects for Systran (2000 forecast sales of 60 Million francs). To finance its growth the company floated on the Nouveau Marché of the Paris Stock Exchange on September 14th 1999. The jobs provided by the company (30 in the Val d’Oise, 30 in Luxembourg and 45 in California) are very much top level (targeting top flight engineering school graduates or those with linguistics doctorates, etc.) since the methods and tools used for computer-aided translation require a knowledge of both mathematics and linguistics.