Who Built This Tower of Babel? (INT)

“Ortsbo.com is taking a sledgehammer to the tower of Babel” — Gene Simmons

Gene Simmons has penned a catchy lyric or two as a member of 1970s rock band Kiss, but let’s just say that biblical allegory isn’t exactly his strong suit.  The statement here, delivered in his role as spokesperson for Intertainment Media’s Ortsbo.com, while meant to sound clever and impactful is actually more ironic than anything else.  Anyone remotely familiar with the story from the Bible’s book of Genesis knows that the tower of Babel represents, if anything, the unification of people under one language and a common purpose.  And it was God who, in effect, “took a sledgehammer” to it — the result of which was the scattering of people and confusion of their speech, such that they now could no longer communicate with one another.  Perhaps “the demon” missed a few bible study classes as a child, so we can certainly cut Gene some slack here.

The ability to deliver automated, real-time translations is clearly valuable, so it’s important that we ask ourselves: who built this technology that’s capable of uniting us as one people under one language?  Who built this tower of Babel?

According to Intertainment Media, their subsidiary Ortsbo.com did.  The company’s myriad promotional press releases gush about Ortsbo’s translation capabilities and how they will be using this intellectual property to enter new markets with paid products.  Management goes as far in this most recent press release to note that their Live and Global chat event was powered by Ortsbo’s “powerful translation engine.”  Sounds exciting!

The company specifically noted in a press release last July that the source of their translation technology is Hale Technologies Inc.  Hale Technologies was subsequently renamed to SaaS Technologies Inc, and in March of this year Intertainment Media announced that they struck a seemingly informal agreement with this partner that allows them to reap “74% of all future benefits generated from the baseline technology”, whatever that means.  It certainly seems odd that someone would build such a tremendous, world-changing piece of technology — a powerful translation engine — and then give 74% of it away in exchange for marketing support, but hey stranger things have happened before.

Let’s take a closer look at this remarkable technological feat and find out how an automated translation system can be created.  Machine translation, as it is referred to by academics, is any area of ongoing research, and there are really only a couple of systems that I’m aware of that can provide acceptable translations for the multitude of languages that Ortsbo offers. The translations are generated by a highly complex algorithmic process, and the translation engine learns its mappings from the analysis of bilingual texts.  So in other words you have to take millions of documents that have been written in multiple languages, and then statistically analyze them to learn the vocabulary and grammatical rules for each language.  It sounds incredibly difficult, and it is, which is why there have been only a few companies that have ever assembled the intellectual firepower — experts in machine learning and information theory — necessary to build such a system.

Knowing what we now do about statistical machine translation, clearly Ortsbo’s technology partner possesses an impressive assemblage of mathematical talent.  So who is this SaaS Technologies, née Hale Technologies, anyways?  Well, as a small private company it’s impossible to garner a significant amount of insight into their operations.  A little research suggests that SaaS Technologies is essentially a one-person company, perhaps with an assistant or two to deal with administrative matters, run out of an industrial park in Ajax, Ontario.  That person, the 36-year old Mark Hale, was profiled a few years ago by Glass Magazine, so we can learn a bit more about his history.  He was essentially a programmer and IT manager for a number of years, but in 2006 started a business that sells software to glass plants.  While I’m sure his niche glass plant software is a nice business, this is not exactly the background I would have expected for someone that has solely developed such a powerful translation engine.

Perhaps the glass magazine decided to omit all of Mark’s past research and work experience in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence, since it probably wouldn’t be relevant to the magazine’s decidedly low-tech audience in the glass manufacturing industry.  A video interview with Mark Hale last week, however, tells us all we need to know about whether SaaS Technologies or Hale Technologies or Mark Hale has built this tower of Babel.  This has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed video answers the question: what was “the toughest part about creating Ortsbo, a real-time translation tool?”  By all means watch it as it’s a doozy, but the caption to the video provided by Ortsbo tells you all you really need to know:

You might think the toughest part of the program would be the actual translation, but actually it wasn’t, said Hale. The toughest part of developing Ortsbo, a Web 2.0 technology, was getting it to work on all the different browsers.

That’s right, there have been decades of research done at IBM, Microsoft, and Google to refine the methods of statistical machine translation, but this was actually a piece of cake for the sole developer of Ortsbo’s “baseline technology.”  The really, really hard part?  Getting it to work on all those different web browsers!

It is with a fairly high degree of certainty that I think we can conclude that neither SaaS Technologies nor Hale Technologies nor Mark Hale has created the powerful translation engine that translates text in over 50 languages for the Ortsbo web service.  And so the question remains: who, then, built this tower of Babel?

Disclosure: Short INT