Luc Faubert, vice president of globalization, neglects to offer a visitor coffee on a winter morning at 10 a.m., not because he's ill-mannered. Hardly. He's primed, nearly vibrating with enthusiasm, to talk about Alis Technologies Inc., its past and, most importantly, its future.
A new-fashioned Renaissance man with a background in French and Russian litterature and computer science, Faubert seems particularly qualified to speak about his company. "Our goal is to help human beings communicate, that's our mission. Our job is to help that process happen in an elegant manner. Elegance never comes from miscomprehension. You cannot have miscommunication and elegance."
On the subject of translation, Faubert is equally eloquent. "Translation is so difficult. It's quite an achievement, I'd say, when you can actually concoct a meaningful, beautiful, efficient message in another language."
As for the team at Alis, Faubert doesn't hide his admiration. "Our attitude is one of openness, tolerance, not just tolerance of diversity, I'd say, but the quest, the deliberate quest for diversity where people are encouraged to develop multiple and maybe apparently unrelated skills."
When the company was founded in 1981, no one used the word "localization" and MS-DOS meant something different than it does today. In the heart of Quebec where, then as now, the traditional translation sector focussed on French and English, Alis re-engineered two-thirds of the Microsoft operating system so that it could produce Arabic- and Hebrew-language documents. To this day, Alis has offices and "street cred" in the Middle East. "Alis is one of the well-known companies," Faubert says, with the same level of recognition as Oracle and Microsoft.
Alis has always placed as high a premium on technological excellence as it does on linguistic competence and content quality. When describing the tools his company has developed, Faubert eschews the term "machine translation." "Humans translate," he says. He describes Alis' products like Gist-in-Time® as aids to comprehension. He doesn't pretend that the tool produces publication quality translation. The tool provides users with the gist of a text which, in many cases, may be all a user needs.
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