Palo Alto, CA. February 28th, 2017

Machine Translation (MT) technology has advanced rapidly in the last year, setting new quality benchmarks that open the way for wider adoption in the coming years. Consequently, machine translation should be a fundamental component of a translation studies curriculum. To bridge the gap between traditional curricula and technology advances in the language industry, Lilt, an interactive, adaptive machine translation platform, has announced the launch of a University Program, which allows academic institutions to get free access to Lilt for their students and professors.

The University Program enables professors to create a hands-on learning experience for their students on one of the industry’s newest and most innovative technologies: Adaptive Machine Translation, which learns in real-time from human feedback and/or existing translation memory data. Adaptation allows the system to progressively provide better suggestions to human translators, and higher quality for fully automatic translation. Students working with Lilt will be learning the technology that they will most likely go on to use in their future careers.

As a platform that was born in an academic research lab, Lilt supports and encourages its use by universities and their students. The technology in Lilt is based on machine translation and translator productivity research at Stanford University and Google. Co-founders John DeNero and Spence Green met while working on Google Translate in 2011, and started Lilt in early 2015 to bring the technology to modern businesses and translators. Lilt’s University program seeks to further research on machine translation and translator productivity by allowing professors to use and explore the tool in their classrooms, at no charge to them.

“Client turnaround time and pricing requirements are increasingly demanding. Modern translators will need machine assistance to produce better translations faster. Lilt is a product of an academic research lab, and we’re pleased to equip new translators with the latest technology for machine-assisted translation.”  Spence Green, CEO and Co-founder of Lilt.

Several academic institutions have already signed up for this program including University of Maryland, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterrey, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Dublin City University, University of Manchester, University of Surrey and University College London.

“Lilt exemplifies a paradigm shift in how translators and translation technology interact. As educators, I feel it is our job to prepare our students by exposing them to this technology as soon as possible for their future careers.” Jon Ritzdorf, Professor at University of Maryland and Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

Any academic institution wishing to register or receive more information can visit www.lilt.com/academic.