Lernout & Hauspie, the Belgian speech recognition company, has an agreement to Fairfax, Virginia-based Globalink Inc, a machine translation company. Simultaneously, L&H said it was also acquiring AILogic Corp and NeocorTech, two machine translation technology companies specializing in Chinese and Japanese language translation respectively. Publicly-held Globalink, best known for its Barcelona machine translation tool, will be acquired in an all-stock deal for $5.60 per share, valuing the company at around $70m. AILogic is acquired for $5.5m in cash and NeocorTech for $1m. After initial write-offs for in-house R&D, L&H said the acquisitions would be non-dilutive, and aims to have them completed within three months. The new units will be integrated with L&H’s Language Technology Division, headed by Peer van Driesten. L&H is looking to expand the language capabilities of the iTranslator Internet language service, including search, summarization and translation, due out later this year. The Globalink buy also gives it retail translation products, e-commerce translation and a customer base. And the combined acquisitions bring 50 engineers and linguists with them. L&H is based in Ieper, Belgium, and has its US office in Burlington, Massachusetts.
