1Hi Daniel, thank you for having us at Atril’s Headquarters. Please introduce yourself in a few words

Thank you for the opportunity to share my thoughts and ideas. As you probably already know, I’m Daniel Benito, CEO and co-founder of Atril. I was born in Madrid thirty-one years ago to a Spanish father and an American mother, and I grew up attending various international schools in Madrid. I got my first computer when I was 7, so it shouldn’t be surprising that I went on to earn a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Computer Science and Mathematics at Imperial College in London. Besides being interested in all aspects of computers, I am an avid reader of non-fiction, and I have a growing interest in both film and music, particularly jazz.

2Can you tell us the story of Atril? Main events & dates…

The origins of Atril go back to 1993. My father had been working as a translator for a number of years, and I had begun helping him with repetitive translations of technical manuals. Very soon I decided that there had to be a way of automating the repetitive aspects of the work, and I began to experiment with different approaches. I began testing machine translation systems, but after spending a lot of time customizing grammatical reference manuals and dictionaries, it became clear that we needed something completely different. We looked at several translation memory systems, but they were all prohibitively expensive and we were not impressed with their features. Both my father and I were competent programmers (or so we thought at the time), so we decided that we could have a better TM tool if we wrote it ourselves; by the end of the year the software was working so well that we decided we could sell it.

The next milestone was probably in 1996, when we released version 2 of Déjà Vu. The product was so successful that we decided to dedicate ourselves to it full-time. The third significant date would have to be the release of Déjà Vu X in 2003.

[Sadly, the next important date was in early 2004, when my father passed away.]

3What is your working philosophy today?

Our working philosophy is very much the same as when we began - to develop tools that allow professionals in the translation industry to do their job faster, better and more easily. One way to do that is to automate the repetitive parts of their work so they can concentrate on the more creative
or unique aspects, but there are also other ways of achieving this: for example, we strive to provide responsive and efficient customer support, as part of a wider philosophy of establishing close working relationships with all of our customers.

4Let's talk about the products

a  CAT tools? 

Computer-Aided Translation tools, or CAT tools for short, include a wide range of software tools designed to aid translators in their daily work. Spelling and grammar checkers, dictionaries and terminology databases, translation memories and project management tools can all be considered CAT tools.

b  And why are they essential today for the translation industry?

The challenges faced by the translation industry nowadays are not all that different from the ones faced by other businesses: they need to increase productivity and quality, and reduce costs. In one way or another, CAT tools address these needs and allow translation professionals to optimize their working processes.

5Déjà Vu is the name of the software designed by Atril? What is the genesis of the name? We love Déjà Vu….

When we first began designing and developing Déjà Vu, the main emphasis was on automating the translation of repetitive texts by reusing existing translations. I don’t think we had given much thought to the naming of the tool before we realized that “déjà vu” was the perfect name: it was short, understood in most languages yet clearly foreign (and therefore involving translation to some degree), and its reference to the feeling of having experienced something before was directly relevant to the problem we were trying to address when we wrote the software. Naturally, we
fell in love with the name as soon as we thought of it, and we didn’t even bother to consider any alternatives.

6Your R&D department is based in Madrid, these days you develop your own technology. Déjà Vu combines state of the art TM (translation memory) technology, with EBMT (example-based machine translation) technique.

a  Can you explain to the beginner I am this combination, EBMT & TM

EBMT is a term that can be applied to a number of different techniques that can be used to translate by analogy; EBMT therefore requires a large knowledge base of existing translations, and TM offers exactly that. What we have done so far in Déjà Vu is to use some techniques from EBMT to do “repair” fuzzy matches, by comparing the differences in the source and target sentences and doing the appropriate replacements based on the data in the TM and the terminology database. Alternatively, we can piece translations together from different chunks or phrases in the databases.

b  Why this choice? Advantages? Main skills?

Adding this technology to Déjà Vu was a natural consequence of our goals for the product - we noticed that many fuzzy matches could be automatically fixed and turned into exact ones if we could combine them with other information in the databases. This meant that we could save even more time when working on repetitive texts, and this was something that no other tool even came close to achieving.

c  When you read the “big survey” by the Imperial College of London, you must have been rather proud of your technological choices?

Indeed, reading the results of that survey was very pleasing, not only because they highlighted the technical superiority of our software, but also because we obtained the highest score in customer support. The survey definitely confirmed that the technical decisions we made in the past
were good ones, and that the extra effort we put into providing good customer service is appreciated. It also encouraged us to keep working on further advancing our technology.

d  Are you working on new projects at present?

We are currently working on a new version of Déjà Vu, once again concentrating on quality and efficiency, in particular with improved QA features and an interface that is more intuitive and therefore easier to learn and to use. We are also very close to releasing our server-based TM storage
module, which integrates seamlessly with Déjà Vu, but provides a robust and scalable platform for storing large volumes of translations.

7How do you imagine the future for your company and your industry?

In general, I think that with the translation industry concentrating on automating business processes with workflow and project management tools, people have forgotten that there is still a lot of room for improving the core translation technologies. In particular, now that even desktop computers are powerful enough to store and process large quantities of data, I think there is an opportunity to take even more concepts and techniques from EBMT and integrate them with current TM technology. I have a lot of respect for the recent advances that companies like Microsoft have made in the field of statistical machine translation, but I still think the quality of those translations is not good enough - we need to work on reusing the work of human translators with greater efficiency, rather than trying to replace them.

a   Workflow?

But workflow automation is certainly not something that I think should be ignored - in fact, based on my conversations with people in the industry, my feeling is that we need to move beyond providing shrink-wrapped GMS products. Why reinvent the wheel and force customers to replace their
existing systems, when we could be much more flexible and provide them with individual modules that can be integrated into their existing tools? The industry needs to focus much more on web service and workflow standards and make components that are easily interoperable. Once this is achieved, I think it will open the door for a true revolution in the way language services are offered and used.

b  Ambitions?

Our ambition, naturally, is to lead the way in bringing these innovations to the industry, so that people continue to associate our name with productivity, quality and efficiency.

Thank you very much Daniel for giving us your “360° vision” of the Cat Tool industry, and see you soon for pursuing these fascinating discussion.