EPA

Surf buddies start translation company and expect €1 million in revenues this year.

Texts by a machine translated, a trifle stilted may seem.

Portuguese tech entrepreneur and language technology expert Vasco Pedro understands that better than most.

“The promise of having machine translation that really works, hasn’t happened,” he explains. “I don’t think this is possible in the next 15 years.”

Spotting a market need among international companies, this 38-year-old with a life-long “passion for language” set about combining the speed of computerized translation and the subtleties of the human touch.

The result is Unbabel. Set up by Pedro and a bunch of PhD-touting surf buddies in 2013, the Lisbon-based company now has an office in San Francisco and runs a network of 30,000 translators working in 23 languages.

Revenue last year reached 0,000, but business this year has been jumping by over 30 percent a month. The goal of “hitting the million run rate by the end of the year” is now very doable, Pedro said.

After securing HirBetolteseOszlop1.5 million in funding from the likes of Google Ventures and Matrix Partners last summer, and building a customer base that includes Microsoft, Pinterest Yummly and HotelTonight, Unbabel has emerged as a star performer in Lisbon’s burgeoning startup scene.

“Unbabel is a good example of what Portugal is about,” says Pedro Rocha Vieira, president of Beta-i, a nonprofit that supports local start-ups. “It’s a team of really talented people, it shows that with the right investment you can attract international talent.”

Taking time out to talk on the sidelines of a high-powered investors’ conference in a trendily dilapidated baroque palace, Pedro explains how Unbabel works.

“We start by doing machine translation as a basis for the translators to work on. Then we take that machine translation, we segment it into chunks and we send each chunk to multiple people to correct. We then recombine those chunks, and we have a senior translator review it all for consistency, and quality, etc.”

That may sound convoluted, costly and time-consuming, but Unbabel CEO says it can revolutionize the way companies reach out to markets around the world.

“It’s extremely fast and very affordable,” Pedro insists, claiming the company’s blend of artificial intelligence and brainpower enables it to turnout large-scale, high-quality translations four-times cheaper and five-times faster than traditional translation services.

“The goal of Unbabel is to make translation seamless and accessible at all times in all things that you do.”

Pedro and his company co-founders hit upon the idea after hearing the complaints of friends in Portugal struggling to rent out vacation homes to monoglot Germans and Swedes.

They quickly realized the expanded potential of integrated translation for companies operating online in a globalized market where there is a constant need for multilingual updates of product lists, newsletters, blogs and other content.

“They want translation to be embedded in production so content is automatically available in multiple languages, and they want to do this in a continuous and scalable way,” he says.

“Companies were hitting a wall, they were trying to use their interns, they tried a bunch of stuff and it’s a nightmare. Then we come in and say ‘Hey, not only can we do it more affordably, but we can give you one entry point, we can take care of everything.’ That’s been working wonderfully.”

Pedro himself slips freely from his native Portuguese to flawless US-accented English, honed during a 10-year stay in the United States, where he picked up PhD in natural language processing at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. Between studies he squeezed in research internships at Google, Honda and Siemens.

“I loved the time that I spent there, but they are all very large companies, so it was clear to me that the chance of having an impact was so small,” he recalls. “It felt like I needed to do something in which I have more impact. Being at Google was what made me certain that I wanted to do a start-up.”

Married with four daughters, Pedro is adamant the company’s expansion won’t force an end to a weekly ritual shared by all 16 staffers at the company’s headquarters in Portugal’s Atlantic-seaboard capital.

“On Friday afternoon, the whole company goes for surf lessons,” he says. “We all suck, so it’s a lot of fun. It keeps you in touch. It reminds us every week that you’re doing this with people you enjoy being with.”

Source: http://www.politico.eu/