companies

SYSTRAN

French machine translation software company founded in 1968; also maintains the open-source faster-whisper speech-to-text library on GitHub.

SYSTRAN was founded in 1968, growing out of machine translation research traced to Peter Toma; its early technology was used by the U.S. Air Force to translate Russian into English during the Cold War. It is one of the oldest machine translation companies in the world and is headquartered in Paris, France. Over its history SYSTRAN changed ownership several times, including a period beginning around 2014 when South Korean investors (STIC Investments, SoftBank Korea and others) held a majority stake. SYSTRAN builds machine translation and natural language processing software for businesses and government agencies. Its engineers also maintain "faster-whisper," an open-source reimplementation of OpenAI's Whisper speech-to-text model built on the CTranslate2 inference engine, widely used for fast automatic speech recognition. In January 2024, SYSTRAN was acquired by ChapsVision, a French data-processing and AI software group, and now operates as "SYSTRAN by ChapsVision." Vincent Godard has served as SYSTRAN's President and CEO since May 2022 and continues to lead the company under ChapsVision ownership.

Founded

1968

Headquarters

Paris, France

Sector

applications