Belgian speech technology company Lernout & Hauspie is to acquire multilingual technical publisher the Heitmann Group as part of an effort to transform its current L&H Translation Division into what it calls a multi-lingual document solutions unit. Heitmann has large customers in the aerospace, government and automotive markets, including General Motors, British Aerospace and British Telecom. L&H will pay $35m for Heitmann, made up of $15m in common stock and the assumption of $20m in repayment of debts. After initial write-offs in its in-process research and development, the company expects the acquisition to be accretive to earnings per share. The new division will combine L&H’s existing continuous dictation software, vocabulary modules and machine translation tools with Heitmann’s authoring tools, document creation and web publishing tools. Around 250 Heitmann software engineers, linguists and technical writers will be added to the division, which will continue the development of L&H’s multi-lingual website service. The division will consist of 800 people in all, 350 from Heitmann, which has offices in Germany, the UK, Denmark, Norway and the US. L&H has made eleven acquisitions over the past two years.
