IN A WORLD that is becoming more connected by the day, languages are big business.

Language-learning app Duolingo recently completed a funding round that valued the company at a healthy $470 million (€428 million), while the machine translation industry is expected to be worth nearly $1 billion by 2022.

Dublin startup Iconic Translation Machines is joining the push into the market for business customers, offering cloud-based automatic translation software.

Today the company announced it has raised €400,000 in seed funding from investors including Enterprise Ireland and the privately-run Bloom Equity and Boole through the Halo Business Angel Network (HBAN).

The startup, which was spun out of DCU in 2013, plans to expand its workforce from 10 to 25 staff as part of its growth plans.

Iconic’s CEO, Dr John Tinsley, said the company had already achieved strong growth delivering translation technology to the “very complex intellectual property and financial services sectors”.

Our team of experts has created machine translation solutions for content which had been considered too technical and challenging for automated translation,” he said.

Iconic co-founders Dr John Tinsley, left, and Dr Páraic Sheridan, right, with Minister of State Damien English Source: Nick Bradshaw

Its clients already include one of the world’s biggest language service firms, Welocalize, which does everything from translating gadget manuals to legal documents.

Iconic’s main product automatically translates intellectual property papers in nine languages including Chinese and Russian.

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