You may be wondering “why MyDutchPal?” What has this business got to do with the Netherlands? Is anyone on our team Dutch?
Well, to find the answer we have to go back to 1992. Hook and Hatton, the company that owns this website, had obtained a contract to translate a huge volume of chemical specifications for the Dutch science and technology company DSM Research. We soon realised that the set of documents comprised grammatically simple sentences that featured recurring technical terms. Our founder Terence Lewis devised a series of rules to translate these sentences from Dutch into English. This series of rules eventually became “Trasy” the first Dutch-English machine translation program. Siemens Nederland later acquired the rights to utilise this program for their Dutch-English translations and the software was deployed to translate much of the documentation for the HSL-Zuid project – the largest railway infrastructure project in the history of the Netherlands. Of course, MyDutchPal now uses advanced neural machine translation for its Dutch-English translations which it offers as a turnkey project.
