SYSTRAN had some good news — the release of its Version 6 products — and some bad news — lower revenue due to deferred purchases and higher labor and operational costs resulting from getting V6 ready for market.

The Paris-based company saw its sales decrease 7.6% from 2005. SYSTRAN’s 2-year plan to shift its business from services to software hasn’t taken hold yet (see Global Watchtower link below); its software business was down 19.9% from 2005, but its services business leapt 33%.

The company also announced that it would pursue action against the European Commission for violation of its intellectual property rights. This case stems from the EC�s Directorate-Generate for Translation (DGT) 2003 call for tenders to modify the UNIX version of SYSTRAN’s MT system that it had purchased. The DGT chose a company which hired former SYSTRAN employees to do the work.

• Challenges: SYSTRAN has had flat results for a few years now. As it faces off against newer technology from rivals like Language Weaver and from bigger players like IBM, it will have to pump up its marketing and sales messages. Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft lurk at the threshold with their own statistical MT packages.

• Opportunity: Maybe it’s time for SYSTRAN to embrace the inevitable and build a services business around its machine translation engine. Taking the lead of SDL’s KbTS technology plus human services offering, it could insert itself with optimized dictionaries into the workflow for global and domestic multicultural websites that otherwise might never get translated.