On August 27, 2020, the boards of RWS and SDL announced a deal that will see RWS buying SDL. In the UK’s largest tech deal of the year, RWS has agreed to pay GBP 809 million ($1.066 billion) to buy SDL. While there are still a few more regulatory steps that need to be taken, including official shareholder votes, the details of the deal have already been released.

As it stands, RWS shareholders will own about two-thirds of the combined business, while SDL shareholders will own the remaining third. Over time, the SDL brand is set to disappear and the whole company will be placed under the RWS brand.

Microsoft Translator’s addition of Odia to its real-time translation and transliteration brings the total number of Indian languages it supports to 11. Odia is spoken by 35 million people throughout India.

Kent Jespersen will serve as chairman of the advisory board. Other new board members include Robert D. Brouwer, Caroline Codsi, Tracie Crook, Bindue Cudjoe, Jean Cumming, and Gordon D. Giffin.

Translation software company Pairaphrase was awarded a Business Accelerator Fund Grant (BAF) by the State of Michigan to help the company accelerate its path to revenues with highly regulated customers in healthcare.

The funds will go toward a third-party security HIPAA compliance audit and assessment of the web-based translation application that weaves machine learning into its translation software while providing various security measures to protect sensitive user data.

Globalese MT has partnered with text&form to bring neural machine translation to the language services company. text&form will host the Globalese MT artificial translation on its servers. The neural machine translation will add to text&form’s services, which include software localization, SAP translation, technical translation, and multimedia localization.

The Sharjah Book Authority (SBA) is receiving applications for the fourth edition of the Sharjah Translation Award, Turjaman Award. The award is open to international publishing houses that have published translations of an original publication in Arabic. The total value of the prize is AED 1.3 million ($350,000), distributed as 70% for the foreign publishing house that holds the translation rights and 30% for the Arab publishing house that holds the rights of the first edition of the book. The winner will be announced during the upcoming Sharjah International Book Fair, planned for November 4-14, 2020.

A report on the global AI translation market has been released by BisReports. Information on the report just came out in French, but the report is offered in English. The report analyzes big players such as SoundAI, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Alibaba, NetEase, Souhu, Tencent, and ByteDance.

Digital food safety company Squadle creates apps that enable multi-unit operators, convenience stores, and retailers to streamline food safety in the United States. It just added Spanish translation as part of a series of upgrade to its systems. Along with upgrades to dashboards, manager reporting software, a ZeroTouch food monitor, and a COVID-19 safety procedure checklist, the addition of Spanish-English translation should help restaurants deliver a safer dining experience.

Google’s Gboard keyboard will add real-time translation and transcription for voice dictation for Android users.

Eurotranslate has moved to a new office space. The new address is still in Zemun, Belgrade, at Glavna 26.

InterpretCloud is a remote simultaneous interpreting solution that can connect with any meeting platform to support multilingual events, meetings and conferences anywhere — any size and in any language.

SDL announced the launch of SDL Trados Studio 2021, a hybrid translation solution offering flexibility for busy translators and project managers.

SDL Trados Live is powered by SDL Language Cloud and works with SDL Trados Studio to bring users an online translation editor, coupled with a web-based project management and revision experience. The SDL Trados Live Mobile App is available to download for free and gives users the flexibility of being able to manage translation projects from anywhere. SDL is now offering an annual subscription to SDL Trados Studio 2021 for both the professional and freelance editions.

For desktop users, the translation memory (TM) engine has been enhanced to deliver better results, and quality assurance (QA) checks are also improved due to new intelligent TM technology.