The Sorrow of L&H… and Belgium

L&H was in the news again yesterday as its founders were convicted for fraud.

For those of you that have never heard of L&H, Wikipedia to the rescue: “Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, or L&H, was a leading Belgium-based speech recognition technology company, founded by Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, that went bankrupt in 2001. The company was based in Ieper, Flanders, in what was then called the Flanders Language Valley (mimicking the Silicon Valley).”

I still remember the hype about the company so well. I was studying at the time and I cannot deny that its apparent success played a role in my focusing on computational linguistics and NLP in my licentiate years.

My cunning plan (to quote Blackadder) for future career success however did not work out as planned. Does it ever? Turns out I was not the only Flemish person with this career prospect in mind and other language skills were more in demand around the time I graduated.

I ended up joining Trados (www.trados.com) instead and by the time I did get the call from L&H, I was too invested and too in love with Trados, its startup culture and its prospects to switch. Even though it was still a fairly difficult call and I needed some talking to from the then CEO (who happened to be in Brussels at that time).

Regardless of my not joining them in the end, I was however very, very proud of the company and excited about what this would mean for Belgium. I still remember going into Microsoft Office and checking for the L&H copyright in its About Box. And feeling yes, proud.

And then, the demise, the ugly truth, lots and lots of investors losing their money and lots and lots of talented people losing their jobs. And, in a way, it feels like Belgium lost its place forever in a burgeoning field that could have been theirs due to yes, its language skills — with or without L&H.

Reading the news today, I wonder if the wounds are still too deep to support another NLP startup in Belgium any time soon or any “larger than Belgium” tech startup story overall.

And that is the saddest thing of all.

Growth projections of MT market?

Interesting discussion in the Automated Language Translation Group (LinkedIn) in regard to Mark Tapling’s forecast of a $67.5 billion Digital Translation Market.