The Story of Fodina – Part 1

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The Story of Fodina - Part 1

Every company has a story. Ours begins in the mid-1980s, long before Fodina Language Technology officially existed.

Black-and-white photo of five researchers at Linköping University in 1986, gathered around a Xerox Lisp machine. From left to right: Nils Dahlbäck, Arne Jönsson, Magnus Merkel, Mats Wirén, and Lars Ahrenberg. The group was part of the newly founded Natural Language Processing Laboratory (NLPLAB), a hub for early research in human-computer interaction and computational linguistics.

In 1986, the Natural Language Processing Laboratory (NLPLAB) was founded at the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA) at Linköping University. In the above photo from that time, you’ll find Nils Dahlbäck, Arne Jönsson, Magnus Merkel (our CEO until recently), Mats Wirén, and Lars Ahrenberg gathered around a cutting-edge Xerox Lisp machine.

Around the same time, another seed was planted: the Cognitive Science program at LiU, initiated by Nils and Arne. One of the first students in that program was Michael Petterstedt, who later collaborated with Lars and Magnus on terminology research.

Eventually, Magnus, Lars, and Michael founded Fodina – and the story began.

Official beginnings

Fast forward to the early 2000s. The terminology research at IDA won a contest hosted by Vinnova, the Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems. Thanks to the resources from that win, Fodina Language Technology AB was officially registered on 10 February 2004.

Two men (Lars and Magnus from Fodina) are on a stage. They are holding a bouquet of flowers and a big check for 25,000 Swedish crowns.

Just a few years later, in 2008, we were awarded “Årets rookie” (Rookie of the Year) by Östgöta Enskilda Bank, recognizing promising new companies in the Linköping–Norrköping region. Along with a check big enough to belong on a TV game show, the jury’s motivation read:

“Through purposeful work from research project to commercialization, Fodina Language Technology AB have created a unique product and good establishment in a well-defined part of the market.”

Building Partnerships

We know that terminology doesn’t do much good just sitting in an Excel sheet or buried in a database. It needs to be where the users are: in front of the writers, in the tools, in the workflow.

That’s why, after working with terminology services and management for a few years, we reached out to Acrolinx. And in 2009, we were excited to start offering our customers the Acrolinx terminology database and content checking tool, alongside our own terminology expertise. A match made in our kind of heaven.

At the time, Acrolinx offered checking in English, German, and French – but not Swedish. Instead of letting that stop us, Acrolinx opened the door for us to implement Swedish support ourselves. In 2011, the first version of Swedish language support in Acrolinx was released.

We remain a proud Acrolinx partner to this day, continuously improving language support for our customers. Read more about our partnership in Acrolinx’s blog.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we explore how our own tools, TermCatch, and new collaborations expanded the story.

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Terminology

/ˌtɝː.məˈnɑː.lə.dʒi/

The specialized words and phrases used within a particular field, profession, or area of study. It’s the vocabulary that allows experts to communicate effectively and precisely about complex concepts.