VISION & MISSiON
The Company
ESTeam AB is a European software company founded in 1995 to develop and market language technology software. The company is registered in Sweden, headquartered in Berlin, and has its core development team in Athens.
ESTeam has provided software and services for LangOps and cross-border interoperability. We are a long-standing software provider to EU organizations and blue-chip companies. ESTeam is actively involved in ground-breaking innovation projects in the fields of NLP and AI.
Our vision is to enable communication between companies and customers, and organizations and citizens, no matter which language they use.
Our mission is to make the processing of textual data language-agnostic. We achieve this by data interoperability through semantic information infrastructures and multilingual search.
HistorY
Our Origin
ESTeam was founded to solve a translation problem for Thomson Reuters. All their foreign IP data resources had to be understandable in English. Tens of millions of words should be translated on the fly in their document publishing process with less than a two minute delay. In 1997, the first five languages went live and multiple new languages were added in the coming years.
At the same time our CEO was busy building TRADOS to become a global champion. His first large contract with the EU Commission was signed and Microsoft invested in the company. He sold TRADOS in 2005 and joined ESTeam with all his knowledge in 2010. TRADOS is human user interaction, and ESTeam textual data processing for the purpose of automation. With these two backgrounds the invention of the way we do LangOps was inevitable.
langops
Our Future
LangOps is still a novel concept. It uses new ways of organizing tasks and data, and requires a smart combination of AI, NLP, workflow, and humans-in-the-loop. We like the picture of a language factory. Like an industrial factory it consists of many standard but also some custom-made components, a content pipeline, and humans for tasks which cannot yet be automated. Firstly, everything needs to be smartly put together and then constantly be optimized by collecting and analyzing production data.
ESTeam designs, builds, and operates such language factories in a SaaS model. Sometimes we only provide consulting or deliver single machines. We deliver complete solutions in consortium with partners, who provide the humans-in-the loop.
Language factories are not yet a ready-to-deploy product. They are custom engineered to meet the content owner’s needs. Factories require a certain throughput to run efficiently. Currently ESTeam supports global companies and organizations to move to a LangOps model. Our goal is to productize the learnings and tech of every language factory deployed, thus lowering entry barriers.
ESTeam’s future is to become the preferred partner for everything LangOps.
LEADERSHIP
ESTeam Management
Jochen Hummel
CEO
Jochen is a well-known, internationally experienced software executive and serial entrepreneur. He has been CEO of ESTeam AB since 2010. He is also vice-chairman of LT-Innovate, the Forum for Europe’s Language Technology Industry.
Jochen has a software development background and grew his first company, TRADOS, to become the world leader in translation memory and terminology software. In 2006 he founded Metaversum, the inventor of the virtual online world Twinity and was its CEO until 2010.
Guðrún Magnúsdóttir
CSO and Chairperson
Gudrun founded ESTeam in 1995. She was the head of several European Projects at the University of Gothenburg and has been active in the field of Language Technology with a focus on knowledge structures and multilingual issues since 1985.
She brings decades of experience in data driven multilingual software combined with essential knowledge of information infrastructures and their construction and deployment in any context.
Lambros Kranias
CTO
Lambros co-founded ESTeam and has served as CTO ever since. He has a background in communications and signal processing. His passion is language technology software, analysing technical and textual requirements, and architecting solutions and systems.
Lambros has a PhD in Computer Science/Statistical Methods in Natural Language Processing. He brings a profound technical expertise in multilingual software and SaaS to the team, especially on advanced search and statistical methods used in software deployed in interoperability efforts.
Michael Wetzel
Chief Product Manager
Michael joined ESTeam in 2011. His focus is multilingual knowledge management and ontology technologies. For more than ten years he was product manager of SDL MultiTerm, the market leading terminology management product. He is an active contributor to the ISO TC37/SC3 and DIN NA 105 standards.
He has a deep know-how of multilingual problem solving and applying standards in different contexts as well as long term experience in project management.