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Press Release

Discover the new @promt and forget free translation on the Internet!

February 21, 2006

Lingua Technologies today announced the availability of the new version of the translation software @promt 7 for the markets of Québec and Canada.

If you are disappointed with free translation software on the Internet, the newly released version 7 of @promt—the most accurate translation software on the market—will rebuild your confidence in computer aided translation.

The translation software available on the Internet, even what is offered by ProMT, which is the best on the market, with www.online-translator.com, is designed to meet general needs and uses a general lexicon that is the source of many problems.

Indeed, most words of a language have multiple senses and a range of possible translations which vary from one domain to another. For instance, the word “grille” in French is translated in English by many different words, such as bar, gate, grid, scale, schedule, etc., depending on the specific domain. Likewise, if someone translates an avocado recipe, it would be silly to translate “avocat” in French as “lawer” (in the justice sense) in English, instead of “avocado”, the fruit. Lately, a news item reported the unfortunate translation of “Governement Whip” by “fouet du gouvernement” (in the sense of flagellum or horsewhip) rather than the typical “Whip du gouvernement” (the party whip). This is precisely the kind of mistranslation that reflects poorly on Internet translation tools.

For more effective results, you need not only a better technology, but also specialized dictionaries and a personal user dictionary in which you put the words that you use. Specialized dictionaries very substantially improve the accuracy of translations in specialized domains. This is exactly what the @promt software offers. For example, the unfortunate “fouet du gouvernement” incident might have been avoided by adding a simple entry to the dictionary.

For this reason, the core bilingual dictionary (English-French) of the new @promt has doubled in size, with more than 610,000 words and word co-occurrences with their translations. The algorithms have been improved, producing translations with even greater precision. In addition, three large specialized bilingual dictionaries covering the business, Internet and computer domains are now included in @promt version 7.

The new @promt gives you the choice of four languages (German, English, Spanish or Russian) for translating to or from French, all on the same CD. Choose and install a translation language, and then separately order further translation languages directly on the Internet, using a simple activation code. Among the other features of the new @promt, note the OCR (optical character recognition) function that allows the translation of graphical files such as PDF, JPG or BMP.

To make them available to a greater number of customers, the line of excellent ProMT products is now priced at $99 CAD for @promt Personal Office and $199 CAD for the @promt Professional Office.

“The @promt software meets important needs of Canadian and Québec markets. As an amusing exercise, you can try free translation software on the Internet, but for serious work, you are better to invest a little money to get @promt and take a few minutes to create your own personal dictionary. You will see the progress made over the last 10 years by ProMT translation software”, says Mr. Claude Coulombe, president of Lingua Technologies, which is responsible for the distribution of ProMT’s products in Québec- Canada. Furthermore, Lingua Technologies offers integration, training and dictionary-building services to interested companies.

Designed by ProMT in St-Petersburg, Russia, ProMT translation technology has received a great deal of recognition for its excellence from publications such as SVM, PC Magazine France and XP Solutions, as well as numerous awards from experts in France, Germany, the United States and Russia, and has even been purchased by NASA (http://www.e-promt.com/en/news/2306.php).

ProMT offers three different products on the market:

@promt Personal Office 7

@promt Personal Office 7 is a cost-effective translation solution intended for the translation needs of SOHO users, students and small firms. @promt Personal Office 7 translates quickly and accurately your letters, e- mail, Word documents, Web pages, PDF files and other image files. With its convenient, easy-to-use yet powerful linguistic editor and its simultaneous display of the original and translated texts in two windows, @promt Personal Office 7 lets you create user dictionaries with an unlimited number of entries. Furthermore, @promt Personal Office 7 offers the “Topic Templates” function, a thematic preference tool that allows the fine tuning and easy management of entire sets of parameters for the translation of different topics and themes with great accuracy.

@promt Professional Office 7

@promt Professional Office 7 is the complete translation solution for the professional writer, the translator or the business without frontiers. @promt Professional includes all the functions of the Personal Office version, as well as a set of advanced facilities ideal for the business world and government agencies. It offers the ability to be integrated into Microsoft Office 2000/XP/2003 for direct translation from MS Word, MS PowerPoint, MS Excel, MS Outlook and FrontPage, an integrated translation memory, an acquisition tool to create personal user dictionaries quickly, batch translation of files and XML document translation. The important integration and customization capabilities of @promt Professional make it the high-end translation solution of ProMT.

@promt NET Professional 7

@promt NET Professional 7 is the network version of the @promt 7 translation software. The product is a client-server solution intended for all kinds of business working environments. The shared dictionaries in the NETPro base allows corporate standards to be established for terminology translation throughout the enterprise. All users are granted access rights to the specified function set according to their user identity. @promt Net Professional 7 is the only client-server product on the market— combining the excellent customizability and usability of desktop software and the scalability and administration options of an enterprise server.

“The Canadian market is without any doubt the most demanding market for French-English translation software, which makes it even more challenging and exciting. Now, after the successful sales of of Reverso, which incorporated a translation engine by ProMT, and the positive support received by @promt v6.5 software, we know the expectations of highly demanding Canadian customers and we are ready to provide them with the new version of our award- winning software, featuring not only long-awaited functionality such as image- file translation and improved customization and integration capabilities, but also offering 4 language pairs as one pack at a very affordable price”, says Ilia Klimakov, Overseas Markets Director of PROMT.

About ProMT

Founded in 1991, ProMT is the world-leading provider of natural language processing technologies. The company offers an award-winning automatic translation application and services for seven European languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Russian, 21 translation directions in total.

ProMT provides translation solutions for the Internet, corporate Intranets, PCs, handheld devices and WAP under the trademark @promt.

ProMT’s translation solutions are used at NASA, NEC, Lucent SAP, Xerox, Lycos and other well-known companies. The ProMT development platform enables system integrators to integrate the translation capabilities into the existing enterprise content management systems, document management systems, knowledge management, ERP, CRM and Databases.

About Lingua Technologies

Specialized in linguistic engineering, the mission of Lingua Technologies is to develop and market computer-aided writing and translation tools. The company intends to take advantage of the emerging bitext paradigm in translation and of machine learning in order to develop software capable of increasing the productivity of translators.

Its Lingua Diffusion division distributes the translation software line of ProMT, the leader in automatic translation technology. Lingua offers complete solutions: translation systems, customization and dictionaries, for all kinds of businesses and for professional use on the Internet and Intranets.

Lingua Technologies relies on the entrepreneurial experience of Mr. Claude Coulombe and its team in the development and marketing of language engineering applications, experience acquired at Machina Sapiens, which created the famous “Correcteur 101” French grammar checker. Lingua Technologies benefits from strategic alliances with the RALI laboratory at Université de Montréal, Logiciels De Marque in Québec, Transetix GSI in Ottawa and Promt in St. Petersburg, Russia.