Ten Years

Some readers probably consider Kilgray a newcomer in the translation industry. These readers will be surprised to learn that Kilgray becomes ten years old these days (weeks? months?).
It all depends on where you start counting. The idea of creating (yet another) translation environment formed sometime in May 2004. Back then, the three founders (Gábor, István, and myself) had been working for MorphoLogic, a renowned NLP (natural language processing) company, which was busy experimenting with language-aware translation memory technology, and we needed some tool to test it. We then figured that developing a good translation tool would make good business for MorphoLogic, so we sort of drafted the functionality, and went to the MorphoLogic board with it. The board said thanks, but no thanks – they felt that this is foreign to the legacy profile of the company, which was centered on hardcore linguistic research.

Unfortunately (what? Luckily, rather, as it turned out), we three were too far gone with the idea and the enthusiasm it spawned. Much as we respected – and still respect – MorphoLogic and the colleagues there, we decided to create a new company, and started preparing for it.

The first draft of a memoQ (then memoQ.Lite) user manual was completed on September 21, 2004. The three founders then managed to discuss, comment, and update the manual (which can be considered the first memoQ specification) on September 29, 2004.

By the way, the name ‘memoQ’ was coined – and generously offered – by our then colleague, now friend, Szabolcs Kincse, who now runs a well-known Hungarian portal of popular linguistics called nyest.hu. Szabolcs, thank you for that!

The kilgray.com domain was registered on October 3, 2004. This was preceded by a discussion of possible names (also for the product), which involved hilarious options I’d be too embarrassed to quote here.

Busy months followed. We had to figure out how we could develop and finance memoQ. At the end of January 2005, we agreed with a group of developers at the Technical University of Budapest that they would develop version 1 for us for what they thought was a generous price – we still had to think hard how we could come up with so much. I wouldn’t like to go into the gory details of getting the money – let it be enough to say that the same group of developers, in a much more expanded form, is still with us as I’m writing this.

One of the means we tried to finance the development was to market and sell a linguistic tool – an intelligent Hungarian find and replace add-on for Word called xPlace. xPlace was developed by Gábor Ugray, using licensed MorphoLogic technology. Gábor took no salary for the development work. The exact release dates escape me at the moment, but the online download was released in February, and a physical product was released sometime in May 2005. I’d rather not say how it sold.

In September 2005, another historic event followed: over two weeks, a publishing company called SZAK (owned, to this day, by my mom and dad) translated a book on programming from English into Hungarian – using memoQ server. This is actually the first recorded use of the product. No online projects then, just shared translation memories and term bases. There is this very special group of translators who can boast they worked with memoQ server even before it existed.

memoQ version 1.1 (hand in hand with memoQ server, as always ever since) was finally released in  April 2006, with version 2.0 following in November 2006.

Around this time, we sold the first ever memoQ license to Hungarian translator Mihály Ökrös. He was new to translation tools, and his enthusiasm and endorsement fueled ours to a great extent.

We sold our first server in July 2007 – anyone who claims to have owned a memoQ server before that, please come forward.

On February 8, 2008,  a company called SDL acquired another company called Idiom, Inc. The latter had a very committed and talented LSP partner program manager – Peter Reynolds. As early as in late March, 2008, Peter was already consulting us on strategy and planning. A few months later, he joined us as a co-owner.

The rest is public history – 2008 was the first year we could finance the company entirely from sales. And this is the case ever since. Thank you for helping us make this happen!