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Machine translation letter

This letter is designed to send to Translation providers requesting machine translation software. Make sure you change the company name and specifics if using it for other companies.

(suggest changes at the bottom)

Mr Jo Lernout
Founder and Managing Director
Lernout & Hauspie
Flanders Language Valley 50
8900 Ieper, Belgium

Dear Mr Lernout,

My name is Nick Moraitis, a 17-year-old student from Australia. I am writing to you on behalf of Nation1 (www.nation1.net), a youth-run, adult-advised non-profit project to build a global network of young people aged around 12-18. Our network, to go live on the Internet later in the year 2000, will be internationally focused. Core goals of the site are to encourage cross-cultural communication, inspiration and action amongst young people. Therefore, it is particularly important that we integrate strong multilingual capabilities. It is intended to have maximum impact and massive scope and we are building a coalition of partners including the MIT Media Lab, UNESCO, Oxfam, Futurekids and a variety of youth organisations. Nation1 has been sponsored by Swatch, Sega, Apple, Compaq and other companies, and we are actively seeking Foundation support. We expect to have a large number of users, up to 300,000 within a year.

We believe Lernout and Hauspie would be a perfect partner in delivering machine translation services throughout our online community. We have already been working in an MT-assisted environment, as Nation1 grew out of the JrSummit 1998 held at the MIT Media Lab. This Summit brought together 100 young people in real life. It also connected a further 3000 in 139 countries around the world via an especially tailored online forum that included automatic MT on e-mail and chat. Within the Nation1 Network we would like to place translation at the core of the site, allowing for full integration with e-mail, chat, news, messaging, and other features. We believe people form the core of any Network, and we also plan to integrate a system of human drafting to improve upon the MT of important documents. We also plan to block use of our internal translation system for external, perhaps commercial reasons (ie. translation is for user's Nation1 participation only).

We do not envisage the potential relationship with Lernout and Hauspie as exclusive, primarily because we would like to offer the widest possible range of translation language options. However, we will provide regular and complete reports of the usage and users of all translation engines to assist the development of your products.

Our relationship with the MIT Media Lab is close, and students and faculty from MIT will be involved in the development and evaluation of Nation1. As well as providing advise and technical support, we envisage they will contribute to a report on the integration of translation on such a wide scale which the taskforce will produce in the future.

We think Nation1 would be a very good 'showcase' for your technologies. Nation1 will link the 'net-generation' of the future, and (we believe) demonstrate the potential impact and importance of networked multilingual communication. More information on Nation1 is at our website: http://www.nation1.net

We hope you will consider this proposal. If you have any questions don't hesitate to contact me at nick@nation1.net, or our Technical Coordinator, Ian Wojtowicz at ian@nation1.net . Please write in your preferred language.

Yours Sincerely,

Nick Moraitis

Any alternations? What do you think? (Write them below this!)