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PROMT

PROMT is a Russian software development company founded in 1991 in Saint Petersburg, specializing in machine translation technologies, linguistic tools, and dictionaries for both personal and enterprise use.^[1]^[2] One of the world's leading developers of linguistic IT solutions, the company, whose name stands for "PROject Machine Translation," pioneered early online translation services in Russia with the launch of Translate.Ru in 1998, evolving into comprehensive solutions that combine rule-based and neural machine translation methods.^[2]^[3] PROMT's offerings include offline translators like PROMT.One for mobile and desktop, scalable neural translation servers for businesses, and APIs for developers, supporting more than 40 languages with a focus on accuracy, security, and customization.^[4]^[5]^[6] As of 2025, PROMT serves more than 15,000 customers, powers 200 million daily translations, and reaches 10 million users worldwide through its ecosystem of products.^[4]

History

Founding and Early Development

PROMT was founded in early 1991 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia, as a developer of automated translation systems, emerging as a spin-off from research projects in computational linguistics conducted during the late Soviet era.^[7] The company was established by Svetlana Sokolova, a graduate of St. Petersburg State University's Department of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics who led the computational linguistics laboratory at the Saint Petersburg Pedagogical Academy (now Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia), along with Alexander Serebryakov.^[7]^[8] This initiative was driven by employees from the Laboratory of Engineering Linguistics at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute, capitalizing on the cooperative movement and the rise of personal computers to commercialize machine translation technologies.^[8] The company's initial focus was on rule-based machine translation (RBMT) systems, particularly for Russian-English language pairs, to address the growing need for language tools in the post-Soviet transition period amid economic and technological shifts.^[7] In 1991, PROMT released its first commercial product, an English-Russian MT engine that relied on linguistic rules and dictionaries to enable basic text translation on MS-DOS platforms.^[8] Early development emphasized overcoming the complexities of the Russian language, such as its rich morphology requiring extensive rule sets—up to 800 paradigms compared to 250 for English—through academic collaborations with institutions like St. Petersburg State University and the Herzen Pedagogical Institute.^[7] The founding years were marked by significant challenges, including limited computing resources on early personal computers and the socioeconomic turmoil following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, which necessitated self-funding and reliance on academic partnerships for expertise and development.^[8] Despite these hurdles, PROMT formalized as a limited liability company (PROMT Ltd.) and expanded its team, reaching approximately 10 employees by 1995 while iterating on products like the STYLUS line for additional language pairs such as German and French.^[9] In 1992, PROMT won a NASA tender for English-Russian translation systems.^[8] This period laid the technological foundations for PROMT's survival and growth in the emerging market for translation software.

Expansion and Key Milestones

In the early 2000s, PROMT expanded its operations through strategic relocations and initiatives, establishing a presence in Moscow to support growing domestic demand and facilitate closer collaboration with key technology partners. The company forged significant partnerships with Microsoft, enabling seamless integration of its translation engines into enterprise tools such as Microsoft Office suites, which broadened its adoption in business environments.^[10] A pivotal product launch occurred in 2001 with PROMT Professional, a robust translation solution that initially supported over 20 language pairs, including major European and Russian directions, marking a shift toward professional-grade software for corporate users.^[10] Subsequent key milestones further solidified PROMT's growth. The introduction of cloud-based services in 2015 represented a leap into scalable, on-demand translation, allowing users to access PROMT's engines via APIs without local installations. Following international sanctions imposed on Russia in 2014, PROMT adapted by focusing more on domestic markets to maintain operational resilience.^[11] The global surge in artificial intelligence during the late 2010s prompted a technological pivot in 2020, when PROMT released its Neural MT platform, leveraging neural networks for higher-quality, context-aware translations across multiple languages. This innovation, embodied in products like PROMT Neural Translation Server 21, positioned the company at the forefront of AI-driven language processing. By 2025, PROMT's systems were processing over 200 million translations daily, underscoring its scale in handling high-volume enterprise and consumer demands.^[4] In 2025, PROMT announced the release of PROMT Translation Factory v4 in October and held an AI conference on June 4.^[8] PROMT also developed enhanced offline translation solutions, such as PROMT Master NMT, ensuring secure, internet-independent operations while prioritizing data privacy and customization. These adaptations built on the company's rule-based foundations, enabling sustained innovation amid external challenges.^[12]

Products and Services

Translation Software Solutions

PROMT's flagship translation software solutions consist of offline, downloadable products designed for professional and personal use in controlled environments, emphasizing data security and customization. The core offerings include PROMT Master NMT, introduced in the early 2020s as a neural machine translation (NMT) tool for home and individual users, and PROMT Professional NMT, tailored for business applications. Both products operate entirely offline, supporting over 16 languages such as English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Ukrainian, Polish, and others, depending on the selected language pack.^[12]^[13] These solutions enable translation of texts, emails, and documents while preserving original formatting in formats like DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, PDF, ODF, XML, and HTML, making them suitable for processing large volumes without internet connectivity.^[12] Key features distinguish these software products from online alternatives, focusing on user control and adaptability. Users can customize dictionaries through the Smart Neural Dictionary, allowing the addition and editing of terminology, phrases, and proper names to align with specific needs. PROMT also provides sector-specific adaptations via specialized dictionary collections and translation profiles for domains including medicine, sports, and technical fields, enhancing accuracy in professional contexts. For integration, the software supports compatibility with tools like SDL Trados Studio for professional translators; for enterprise workflows, APIs are available through PROMT's cloud and server configurations to embed translation capabilities, though direct CRM or ERP linkages are typically handled through custom implementations.^[12]^[13]^[14] Pricing follows a one-time license model, accessible for various user scales. Personal editions like PROMT Master NMT start at approximately $199 for multilingual packs covering Western European languages, with individual language pairs available for around $120. Enterprise-oriented PROMT Professional NMT begins at $370 for core pairs like English-Russian, scaling to $740 for broader multilingual support, with add-ons for additional languages at $190 each; volume discounts are available for larger deployments, often negotiated for organizational use.^[12]^[13] These products have been adopted by numerous businesses and individuals worldwide, particularly in sectors requiring data privacy such as government and finance, where offline modes ensure compliance without external data transmission.^[13] Common use cases leverage the software's batch processing for efficient workflows, such as translating technical manuals, business emails, or reports, with the PROMT Agent enabling instant translations directly within applications like browsers or email clients. For Russian-English pairs, a primary focus of PROMT's development, the NMT engine delivers high-quality results requiring minimal post-editing, as recognized in independent reviews for desktop translators. Underlying these capabilities is PROMT's neural translation engine, which powers fluent, context-aware outputs across supported languages.^[12]^[13]

Online and Cloud-Based Tools

PROMT's online and cloud-based tools provide accessible, internet-dependent translation solutions designed for dynamic, real-time workflows in personal and professional settings. The flagship offering, PROMT.One, evolved from the company's original free online translation service launched on March 6, 1998, and was rebranded as a unified platform in November 2019 to combine web, mobile, and API functionalities for private users.^[3] This platform supports over 20 popular European and Asian languages in various combinations, enabling users to translate text, access dictionaries, and utilize phrasebooks through a web interface at online-translator.com.^[15] For free users, PROMT.One allows translation of up to 5,000 characters per session, with registration providing access to expanded features like conjugation, declension, and contextual examples.^[16] Premium subscriptions are available annually for $14.99 (about $1.25 per month) or monthly for $2.49, removing the character limit and providing unlimited translations, an ad-free experience, and priority support, making it suitable for frequent personal or small-scale business use.^[17] The platform's mobile applications for iOS and Android extend this accessibility, incorporating voice input for speech-to-text translation and dialog mode for real-time conversational exchanges, allowing users to speak in their native language while the app handles bidirectional interpretation.^[18]^[19] As of 2025, PROMT updated subscription terms for the PROMT.One Android app and presented new solutions for private and corporate users.^[20] Complementing the consumer-focused PROMT.One, PROMT offers cloud-based services through the PROMT Cloud API, a RESTful interface tailored for developers integrating high-volume translation into web, desktop, or mobile applications.^[21] This API supports instant text and HTML translations across 19 languages with 16 specialized profiles, as well as document localization for formats like DOCX, PDF, and XLSX in 25 languages and 109 profiles, preserving original formatting.^[21] It handles substantial workloads, processing up to 1 billion characters per month under enterprise plans starting at $40 monthly for basic translate functions, with scalable pricing for additional volume.^[21] These tools facilitate seamless embedding of machine translation, such as in e-commerce platforms or customer support systems, without requiring on-premises infrastructure. Security in PROMT's cloud offerings emphasizes data protection, with API documentation outlining standard protocols for handling user content during transmission and processing, though specific compliance details are managed through direct enterprise consultations.^[21] Unlike standalone desktop software, these online tools prioritize collaborative and always-on capabilities, such as API-driven real-time updates, while offering offline modes in mobile apps for hybrid use cases.^[22] Overall, PROMT's web and cloud ecosystem supports efficient multilingual communication, particularly in non-English markets, by enabling quick integrations and user-friendly interfaces for diverse applications.

Technology

Core Translation Engines

PROMT's core translation engines originated with rule-based machine translation (RBMT) systems, developed since the company's founding in 1991. These engines rely on linguistic rules, including morphological analyzers to dissect word forms, syntax parsers to analyze sentence structures, and bilingual dictionaries to map equivalents between languages. The approach ensures structured translations by applying predefined grammar rules, with particular emphasis on handling the complex morphology and syntax of Slavic languages like Russian, which feature rich inflectional systems and flexible word order.^[23]^[24] A key strength of PROMT's RBMT lies in its transfer rules for source language analysis and target language synthesis, supported by comprehensive dictionaries that include general, specialized domain-specific, and user-defined entries. These dictionaries accommodate hundreds of inflection types and thousands of syntactic and semantic characteristics, enabling consistent handling of linguistic nuances. Disambiguation algorithms, integrated through dictionary lookups and rule-based mechanisms, resolve ambiguities such as homonyms by prioritizing contextually appropriate interpretations, resulting in predictable and grammatically accurate outputs.^[23]^[25] Prior to 2020, PROMT advanced its engines through hybrid approaches that integrated RBMT with statistical machine translation (SMT), introduced around 2012. This combination leverages RBMT's precision in grammar and terminology while incorporating SMT's probabilistic models, such as n-gram language models (e.g., 5-gram) and phrase-based alignments derived from parallel corpora using tools like GIZA++. The hybrid process generates multiple translation variants at lexical and structural levels, applies statistical post-editing to refine RBMT outputs, and selects the most probable result based on probability calculations from bilingual data.^[26]^[25]^[24] These advancements demonstrated measurable improvements in translation quality, particularly for challenging language pairs. For instance, in evaluations of English-Russian translations, BLEU scores rose from 19.9 for baseline RBMT to 22.6 with RBMT tuning and post-editing. Similar enhancements were observed in other pairs, such as English-German in the IT domain, where scores improved from 30.62 to 40.3, highlighting the effectiveness of n-gram models and statistical refinements in boosting fluency and adequacy without relying on neural methods.^[24] Over time, PROMT's engines evolved from pure RBMT in the early 1990s to sophisticated hybrids in the 2010s, incorporating automated dictionary extraction from corpora (up to 250,000 entries) and self-training capabilities from SMT components. This progression established a robust foundation for handling over 40 languages, with specialized dictionaries supporting diverse subject domains, while maintaining focus on rule-driven accuracy for morphologically complex tongues. These pre-neural methodologies set the stage for later AI integrations by prioritizing linguistic control and adaptability.^[23]^[26]^[25]

Advancements in Neural Machine Translation

PROMT began developing and integrating neural machine translation (NMT) technologies into its systems around 2018, with commercial release in 2019 and a notable shift toward advanced implementations between 2018 and 2020. During this period, the company adopted transformer-based models for its core engines, drawing inspiration from foundational work in the field while customizing them for morphologically rich languages such as Russian. In particular, PROMT's participation in the 2018 Workshop on Machine Translation (WMT) demonstrated the use of a pure NMT system built on the Marian toolkit, which employed transformer architectures to handle English-Russian translation tasks. These models were tailored for low-resource language pairs by leveraging available parallel corpora and hybrid techniques to address data scarcity in non-Latin scripts and complex grammars.^[27]^[28] At the heart of PROMT's NMT engine is an encoder-decoder architecture incorporating attention mechanisms, which enable the model to focus dynamically on relevant parts of the input sequence during translation. This setup follows the standard transformer design, where the self-attention operation is computed as:

\text{Attention}(Q, K, V) = \text{softmax}\left(\frac{QK^T}{\sqrt{d_k}}\right) V

Here, Q, K, and V represent the query, key, and value matrices, respectively, and d_k is the dimension of the keys. PROMT's implementation, using the Marian framework, processes input through multi-head attention layers to capture long-range dependencies, particularly beneficial for agglutinative languages. The models are trained on large parallel corpora, including sources such as MultiUN (approximately 6 million sentences), ParaCrawl (1.5 million sentences), and in-house news data (around 600,000 sentences), totaling several million sentence pairs after filtering and augmentation with back-translation. This training emphasizes semantic and syntactic analysis to improve fluency in domain-specific contexts.^[28]^[27] To enhance performance, PROMT incorporates fine-tuning techniques for domain adaptation, allowing customization with customer-provided parallel data to better handle specialized terminology and styles. This approach integrates neural components with residual rule-based elements from PROMT's earlier systems, creating a hybrid model that selects the optimal translation path based on text analysis—neural for general fluency and rules for precision in technical or formal content. Multilingual capabilities are achieved through a unified system supporting over 40 languages and more than 100 direction pairs, including low-resource combinations, where shared embeddings and transfer learning from high-resource pairs (e.g., English-Russian) boost generalization. Such adaptations have been shown to yield higher overall translation quality and reduced post-editing needs compared to pure rule-based predecessors.^[27]^[5]^[6] In benchmarks, PROMT's NMT systems have demonstrated competitive performance, with BLEU scores of 27.4 to 31.0 on English-Russian news translation tasks in 2018, reflecting solid accuracy for high-resource pairs at the time. By 2020, hybrid enhancements further improved fluency and adequacy, particularly for enterprise applications involving diverse content types. The architecture's efficiency on cloud GPUs enables low-latency processing suitable for real-time workflows. Innovations include seamless integration into corporate ecosystems, where the hybrid NMT reduces human intervention in post-processing by leveraging rule-based consistency checks alongside neural outputs.^[28]

Operations and Impact

Global Reach and Customers

PROMT maintains its headquarters in St. Petersburg, Russia, with additional offices in Moscow and an international presence in Germany (Hamburg) established in the mid-2000s.^[29]^[30] The company has extended its reach through strategic partnerships, including one with Chuanhow Technologies for distribution in the Asia-Pacific region.^[31]^[29] PROMT emphasizes support for CIS countries, offering specialized tools for Cyrillic-script languages to address regional linguistic needs in official and business communications.^[30]^[10] The company serves enterprise clients through integrations with document management systems and on-premises deployments.^[32] Following international sanctions in 2022, the company enhanced offline translation capabilities to enable service in restricted regions without reliance on cloud infrastructure.^[33]^[5]

Innovations and Industry Recognition

PROMT has significantly influenced the machine translation industry through contributions to open standards and academic collaborations.^[34] PROMT has also tackled key challenges in multilingual models, particularly bias mitigation.^[35]

References

[1]
PROMT 2025 Company Profile: Valuation, Investors, Acquisition
PROMT was founded in 1991. Where is PROMT headquartered? PROMT is headquartered in Saint Petersburg, Russia. What is the size of PROMT?
[2]
https://www.custom.mt/mt-tech/promt/
[3]
PROMT.One (formerly Translate.Ru, PROMT Online) - TAdviser
Jun 17, 2022 · PROMT Service is the owner of the service Translate.ru. This is a free translation service, which the company has been developing since 1998 ...<|control11|><|separator|>
[4]
PROMT Translation Software and Dictionaries
Looking for offline translator for home, online translator for business, dictionary or professional translator?
[5]
Enterprise Neural Translation Server & Customisation - Promt's
PROMT Neural Translation Server is scalable solution for secure machine translation of texts and documents for Windows and Linux.
[6]
[PDF] MT's 'perfect storm,' Russian and beyond - Lexcelera
Founded in 1991, PROMT was a spin-off of several research projects in the former USSR. The founders, Svetlana Soko- lova and Alexander Serebryakov, were ...<|control11|><|separator|>
[7]
PROMT (PROMT)
### Summary of PROMT (1991-1995)
[8]
PROMT - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding
About PROMT · Private · Private Equity · St. Petersburg, Florida, United States · 51-100 · www.promt.com.
[9]
PROMT Company
ProMT is one of the world's leading developers of linguistic IT-solutions for enterprise-level clients and private users since 2007.Missing: establishment 1995
[10]
https://www.promt.com/company/
[11]
PROMT Master NMT - Secure offline translator
Accurate translation and confidentiality! Translate documents and presentations of any size. Read news, blogs and articles in foreign languages. Conduct ...Missing: 2022 | Show results with:2022
[12]
PROMT Professional NMT
With our solution, you can read any texts and documents in English, no matter how complex they are, translate business letters, instant messages, presentations.
[13]
PROMT 21 Dictionary Collection
PROMT 21 Dictionary Collection of specialized dictionaries is intended for use with PROMT 21 applications and supports English, Spanish, French, German, ...Missing: sector | Show results with:sector
[14]
About PROMT.One - Online-translator.com
PROMT.One is a free online translation service from PROMT, a leading machine translation provider. The service uses the unique linguistic technologies based on ...Missing: launched | Show results with:launched
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PROMT.One Translate | Free translation, dictionary and word usage ...
PROMT's online translation service that translates between English, Spanish, German, French, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Kazakh, Portuguese, Hebrew, ...Translate text English to German
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PROMT.One Premium: Free Online Translator and dictionary
PROMT.One is a translator, dictionary, phrasebook for study, work and travel without language barriers! Install the free PROMT.One app to translate texts.
[17]
Translator PROMT.One - Apps on Google Play
PROMT.One is an online and offline translator, a dictionary with transcription and phrasebooks. OPTIONS - 3-in-1: translator, dictionary and phrasebook.
[18]
Translator PROMT.One - App Store - Apple
Rating 4.7 (154) · Free · iOSPROMT.One is an online and offline translator, a dictionary with transcription and phrasebooks. FREE ONLINE VERSION OPTIONS
[19]
[PDF] PROMT Cloud API
PROMT CLOUD API is a cloud-based solution for integrating translation technology into web, desktop, mobile applications or any tools requiring multilingual ...
[20]
Mobile translators PROMT.One. Exact translation in your mobile
PROMT.One mobile app offers translation, dictionary, phrasebook, voice input, transcription, and offline translation for free, to help communicate and learn ...Missing: launched 2015
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PROMT RBMT
PROMT has been developing rule-based engines for 20+ years and this is a proprietary technology that combines translation algorithms and dictionaries created by ...Missing: core | Show results with:core
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[PDF] PROMT Translation Systems for WMT 2016 Translation Tasks
The PROMT Hybrid system is based on three components: the RBMT module, the RBMT post- processor and the statistical post-editing (SPE) module. Text translation ...
[23]
[PDF] PROMT DeepHybrid system for WMT12 shared translation task
Jun 7, 2012 · In this paper we present the PROMT DeepHy- brid submission for WMT12 shared translation task for two language pairs: English-French and. English ...
[24]
Hybrid Translation Technology - Promt's
SMT is based on the comparison of parallel texts with high content volume and calculation of the most probable translation. SMT has a feature of self-training, ...
[25]
Neural Machine Translation - Promt's
PROMT Neural is hybrid machine translation technology based on neural networks (NMT). PROMT Neural Machine Translation provides access to the high ...
[26]
[PDF] PROMT Systems for WMT 2018 Shared Translation Task
The PROMT RBMT System is a mature machine translation system with huge linguistic structured databases containing morphological, lexical and syntactic features ...Missing: 2018-2020 | Show results with:2018-2020
[27]
Languages - Promt's
PROMT translation systems and dictionaries provide translation for a few dozen language pairs, supporting more than 40 languages - English, Russian, German, ...
[28]
Promt - TAdviser
PROMT has been one of the world leaders in the development of linguistic IT solutions for the corporate segment since 1991. PROMT software supports more ...
[29]
PROMT news
PROMT, a world-leading machine translation solutions developer, signed a strategic partnership ... Translation Forum Russia is the most ambitious and ...Missing: software history milestones expansion
[30]
[PDF] PROMT Professional Translator as an efficient tool for patent ...
May 22, 2017 · ✓ dramatically improve his work capacity in terms of speed and quality;. ✓ complete precise translations rapidly using multiple document formats ...Missing: sector | Show results with:sector
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Privacy Policy - Promt's
By installation of this Software you accede to the Privacy Policy and confirm the permit to use the technical data in compliance with this document. If you do ...
[32]
PROMT Company Overview, Contact Details & Competitors | LeadIQ
PROMT was founded in 1991. PROMT. Software DevelopmentRussia51 ...
[33]
[PDF] PROMT Systems for WMT 2018 Shared Translation Task - Statmt.org
Nov 1, 2018 · After this procedure we selected 1.5M sentences from the ParaCrawl corpus and 6M sentences from the MultiUN corpus. The final statistics for the ...Missing: billion | Show results with:billion
[34]
Awards - Promt's
PROMT automated translation technology has been awarded "The Best New Technology" prize by IDC Financial Insights as the next best application for the financial ...Missing: patents 2023 2024
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ISO 18587:2017 - Translation services — Post-editing of machine ...
In stockISO 18587:2017 provides requirements for the process of full, human post-editing of machine translation output and post-editors' competences.Missing: contributions | Show results with:contributions
[36]
PROMT news
PROMT introduces PROMT Neural Translation Server, PROMT Professional NMT and PROMT Master NMT, a New Generation of Neural Machine Translation Solutions.
[37]
PROMT Systems for WMT23 Shared General Translation Task
PROMT participated in English to Russian and Russian to English translation using MarianNMT toolkit, achieving competitive results.Missing: innovation | Show results with:innovation