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For Immediate Release

Susan Barich
Director of Communications
Silicon Valley World Internet Center
650-462-9800
barich@worldinternetcenter.com

SILICON VALLEY WORLD INTERNET CENTER VIEWS IBM'S NEW WEBSPHERE TRANSLATION SERVER

PALO ALTO, CA, APRIL 2, 2001 -- "People stay at a Web site twice as long if it is in their native language, and they are three times more likely to buy," said IBM's Dennis King, Manager, Language Technologies, Tools and CTI Voice Systems.

About 100 technologists and thought leaders at the Silicon Valley World Internet Center (http://www.worldinternetcenter.com) on March 29 were given a look at technology from IBM that can help bring that about.

Based on IBM's advanced Machine Translation technology, the WebSphere Translation Server helps remove language as a barrier to global communication and e-business by enabling enterprises to provide Web pages, e-mail messages and chat converations in multiple languages, in real time.

IBM's technology (http://www.ibm.conm/software/voice) was shown in a combined technology demonstration and Pub gathering, the Center's weekly networking event, of technologists and thought leaders from U.S and international companies including Sprint, Nouveau Systems, AcrossWorld Communications, Sun Microsystems, Finland's Sonera, Switzerland's Viviance New Learning, Germany's SAP AG, Stanford University and Akademie St. Gallen.

"The Internet is a global medium," said King, "but we will not create global communities until we break the language barrier."

Though the majority of Internet users in the world today are English speaking, the number of people on the Net who speak Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean and Spanish is on the rise.

If your web site is only in English," said King, "you are not reaching those rapidly expanding markets."

The result of 30 years of research and development in language translations, the WebSphere Translation Server runs at extremely high speeds, translating a web page from one language to another in seconds, as was demonstrated by King in a real-time, on-line, click-of-the-mouse translation at the Center. Depending on the amount of memory and speed of the processor, Websphere can translate between 200 to 500 words per second, and runs on Windows NT, AIX and Solaris.

Aiming at the market for "gist" understanding of written information (getting the gist of the sentence), IBM's technology uses slot grammar dealing with the sentence verb and the liguistic arguments around it. IBM WebSphere Translation Server supports bi-directional text translation between English and French, German, Spanish and Italian, as well as from English to Chinese (both simplified and traditional), Japanese and Korean.

IBM is an Executive Sponsor of the Silicon Valley World Internet Center, which focuses on the advancement of Internet-related eMarkets, technologies, people, and ideas through the collaborative exchange of knowledge. The Center is located in the heart of Silicon Valley and works on behalf of its sponsors to develop programs specific to the expanding Internet Economy. As multi-corporate, third-party venue, the Center provides a physical and virtual forum for collaboration among technology leaders and key end-users. The Center, a for-profit, fee-for-service corporation, focuses primarily on the areas of eBusiness, eServices and wireless communication.