In part I of this two part series we explored Intertainment Media’s claims of having built the “powerful translation engine” that underlies their Ortsbo.com website. To summarize: those claims appear fanciful and are another example of the fantasy world that investors are given a glimpse of through the Intertainment Media looking-glass.
And so the question remained: who, then, had created this technology that held the promise of uniting the world with a common language? Who had built this tower of Babel?
Naturally my search began with the free online translation services which pre-date Ortsbo. The grandfather of the group — Altavista’s Babelfish, now owned by Yahoo! (YHOO) — is powered by SYSTRAN. As we can see from their most recent annual report, SYSTRAN has 31 computer engineers and 16 computational linguists, which is more or less what you’d expect from a company that builds automated translation software. It is certainly a far cry from SaaS Technologies’ lone developer of software for glass plants.
SYSTRAN’s annual report further explains that they also used to license their technology to Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG). In other words, they once powered all of the free translation tools on the Internet. Google, as they explain, subsequently conducted “an ambitious two-year research programme” to develop translation software, which they finally launched to the public in 2007. And Microsoft has now also developed it’s own statistical translation system.
Knowing that Google grants software developers free access to their translation technology through an application programming interface (API), I immediately sought to compare Ortsbo with Google’s Translate service.
Ortsbo boasts an impressive list of over 50 languages to choose from, some of which you’d probably never even think of if you were creating a machine translation system, such as Afrikaans and Galician. I compared this list to the languages offered by Google. Not surprisingly, every single one of Ortsbo’s languages was also in Google’s list. A coincidence perhaps?
I definitely wanted more evidence. I next looked at the source code on the Ortsbo.com website, to see if there were any clues hidden there. Skimming through the code I noticed a long list of languages and a two-letter code for each one. Interesting. I then took a look at the Google Translate API and quickly saw that Google also uses two-letter codes for their languages. Not just any two-letter codes though, the exact same two-letter codes that Ortsbo uses. Most of the codes were logical, such as ‘FR’ for French, but some of them were totally unexpected, like ‘IW’ for Hebrew. Nonetheless, Ortsbo was using the exact same two letter codes for every single language as Google. A coincidence perhaps?
I still wanted more evidence. Knowing how statistical machine translation software works, I knew that if given a very long passage of text the odds of two different systems returning the same translation was almost nil. So I took a long paragraph of text and plugged it into Google and Microsoft’s translation sites, and not surprisingly they returned completely different translations from each other. I then input the same text into Ortsbo; the result was identical to the translation that Google provided on their website. A coincidence perhaps?
I really didn’t care for any more evidence at this point, but I was still curious to see if there was a final nail in the coffin to be found. And there was.
I searched on Google to see if there were any Google Translate “easter eggs.” Easter eggs are essentially unusual outputs and behaviors that bored programmers code their software to generate in response to a specific, not-likely-to-ever-occur input. In the case of Google Translate, they made it so that if you try to translate the word “sivotre” from French to English — which isn’t even a real word to begin with — the resulting translation is: “Thevacuumcleanerautomaticallystopsifthere.” Guess what Ortsbo translates “sivotre” to? Please, don’t take my word for it, try it out for yourself. A coincidence perhaps?
No.
Not even the slightest chance.
So we now know who built this tower of Babel. No, it was not Intertainment Media, nor was it Ortsbo, nor was it SaaS Technologies, nor was it Hale Technologies, nor was it Mark Hale. It was in fact Google, and as we learned from the SYSTRAN annual report, it took them over two years to build this impressive piece of software.
Unfortunately for Intertainment Media, as we later learn in the book of Job, “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” And on May 26, 2011, the Lord decided to taketh away. Citing “extensive abuse”, Google announced that they were discontinuing free access to the Google Translate API, the very piece of software that generates translations for Ortsbo. Perhaps most humorous, though, was Intertainment Media’s spin on this devastating blow to their business:
“…at a time when organizations like Google are reporting the closing down of its popular Translate application programming interface, Ortsbo, the real time language translation platform, is increasing its global social media distribution…”
So Google gets tired of companies like Intertainment Media that are in gross violation of its API — there is no attribution to Google on the website and they now appear to be launching paid products using it — and so they decide to finally pull the plug on them. When seen through Intertainment Media’s looking-glass, however, this is simply David slaying Goliath.
I am at a loss for words.
Disclosure: Short INT
