Computer-Aided Translation:
Dream or Reality?

Everybody is aware of the communication problems that can occur between different-speaking countries in Europe, South America, etc. These problems inhibit international business, but the newly-emergent means of communication favour trade globalization: you can send a message to the other side of the earth by a few mouse clicks on your PC.
The language barrier phenomenon has been emphasized by this globalization. Over the world, more than 3,000 different languages are spoken, among which only 100 are written.

Trade globalization has sponsored a limited number of languages, including English, which is spoken by 1,400 million people. However, there are only 350 million English native speakers, which implies that more than 1,000 million people speak English as their second or even third language.

It is generally considered that a single language used worldwide would be the ideal solution to solve this Tower of Babel situation. But on second thought, another problem would arise from such a consideration. 'International' English is often anything but standard, and is frequently coloured by its user's mother tongue, both from a lexical and grammatical point of view.

One can thus assume that 'international English' could easily become a series of 'national' Englishes or 'pidgins', with different meanings for the same word, different spellings, even different grammars too. Problems of comprehension would soon reappear, and be even worse than the current ones.

On the other hand, languages reflect the peoples' cultural identity, and these different cultural identities are one of the treasures of the world we live in. Why shouldn't we be interested in other cultures? Indeed, we learn so much when we discover other mentalities and cultural differences. Languages can give us the clues to achieve such discovery.

From these considerations was born the WinDi project, which has three goals:
to help in the understanding of foreign texts; to help in the creation of foreign texts; foreign language learning

WinDi (WINdows DIctionary) is the result of a complicated, long-term development, aiming to allow everyone to communicate in foreign languages with minimal effort and equipment. Thanks to WinDi, everybody can show their willingness to communicate in their addressee's language, to make the first step towards friendlier communication.
However, the main purpose of the WinDi design is to allow corporations to make high-quality texts, letters or presentations, in one or several foreign languages. Hence, corporations will avoid spoiling their 'public image' through poor multilingual communication, which would otherwise inevitably lead to lower returns from a market that could have been better exploited.

Thinking big!

You may ask yourself why you should use WinDi. The answer is very simple: WinDi will strengthen your international contacts. Just imagine you have to send a message to a number of different partners, in various different countries where they do not speak the same language as you.

By using WinDi, and without having to work very hard, you will be able to write sentences in foreign languages, with a quality never before achieved by translation software. The sentences you will create interactively with WinDi can be translated into 6 foreign languages in just a few seconds.

WinDi will also help you to understand texts coming from abroad. And last, but not least, WinDi will greatly help you and your colleagues to familiarize yourselves with foreign languages in a smooth and friendly way. The same can also be done in all of your overseas operations as well, so you can standardize your corporae vocabulary.

This is the key to efficient communication, representing huge savings of time, at every corporate level. WinDi is a multidirectional tool, allowing translation from French to Portuguese, English to Spanish, German to Italian, etc.

Here is an example of a sentence created and translated with the sentence translation tool:

[D] Unser Verwaltungsrat hat dieses Investitionsvorhaben mit Stimmenmehrheit angenommen
[E] Nuestro consejo de administración ha adoptado este proyecto de inversión por mayoría de votos
[F] Notre conseil d'administration a adopté ce projet d'investissement à la majorité des voix
[enG] Our board of directors has adopted this investment project by a majority of votes
[I] Il nostro consiglio d'amministrazione ha adottato questo proggetto d'investimento a maggioranza dei voti
[NL] Onze raad van beheer heeft dat investeringsproject bij meerderheid van stemmen aangenomen.
[P] O nosso conselho de administração adoptou este projecto de investimento por maioria de votos.

These sentences have been created with a few mouse clicks, taking a total time of less than 1 minute!

Here is a Portuguese sentence that you could receive one day in your mail:
'Este novo projecto de lei foi adoptado por maioria de votos'
What would you do then?
WinDi is the solution to help you!

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