This month Asia Online's newsletter leads with a guest post from one of our LSP partners which describes the process of on-going development of customized MT engines. Sajan , a leading global LSP, describes in a recent blog how MT engine quality is "very dependent upon the amount and quality of work put into the engines." This level of input, or customization, is what differentiates generic or instant MT from high quality customized MT.

The main feature article in this month's newsletter tackles one of the most important and controversial issues in the world of MT today - compensating translators for post-editing MT output. As MT continues to gain acceptance by many LSPs as a regular CAT tool, a proper methodology to ascertain a fair rate of compensation is becoming increasingly important. A resolution of this issue is likely to go some way to countering any perceived negativity towards MT by those who are now tasked to work with MT output. The article suggests a practical methodology and, in an effort to advance this topic, readers are invited to provide feedback in the form of comments or their real-life experiences.

Don't forget to sign up for our free webinar. To round the end of the year off and provide insight into what 2013 holds for the professional translation industry, Asia Online CEO, Dion Wiggins will present "Top 10 Trends and Predictions for the Professional Translation Industry - 2013 and Beyond" on Thursday, December 13, 2012.

1. Guest Post - Sajan Blog: Successful machine translation: A peek inside the training process
2. Fair Compensation for Post-Editing MT
3. Lost In Translation

This month's newsletter looks at some of the recent advances in machine translation. Proof points are provided from Asia Online's client Omnilingua Worldwide, and they demonstrate the importance of metrics and provide a comparison of Asia Online's Language Studio™ technology against the technology of the incumbent service provider whom Asia Online recently replaced. One of the more interesting results of this analysis highlights the difference between actual measured levels of productivity when using MT and the levels of productivity perceived by the human translators. The custom MT engine built by Asia Onlne's Language Studio™ for Omnilingua delivered 52% of new original output with no errors at all and thus required zero edits, and the overall quality of the machine plus human approach delivered a more consistent output and higher quality than a human only approach.

If you are attending MemoQFest in Budapest this week, make sure to catch the keynote presentation by Asia Online's CEO, Dion Wiggins, entitled "The Impact of Machine Translation on the Language Services Industry" for insights into where the industry is heading and how LSPs and translators can best prepare for and respond to these changes.

This month's feature article is an analysis of where the translation industry is heading and what it will look like by the end of 2015. Three key predictions are explored from the translator, LSP and market demand perspective with respect to the forces of change that are impacting the market, and they include examples and strategic advice.

Don't forget to sign up for our free webinar. This month our topic is "The Evolution of Translation: What LSPs need to know to survive and prosper in the rapidly evolving automated translation world." This presentation will offer case studies, metrics, proof points and examples demonstrating clear trends for LSPs to visualize and architect their future roadmaps. This is a "must attend presentation" for all senior language industry professionals and executives.

1. Omnilingua Worldwide Measures MT Success
2. Asia Online to Deliver Keynote at MemoQFest
3. MemSource Integrates with Language Studio™
4. 3 Predictions for Year End 2015
5. Lost In Translation

VistaTEC continues to lead in the Machine Translation space and has signed an extended partnership deal with Asia Online further bolstering its pedigree in this service area.

Asia Online has developed the world's first automated technology designed to translate content to near-human publication quality in more than 500 language pair combinations.

"This partnership deal signals VistaTEC's continuing commitment to deliver world class localization experiences to our global client base" Tom Murray, Group CEO.

Phil Ritchie, Chief Technology Officer at VistaTEC added "This further extension of our machine translation capability offers some really exciting opportunities for service innovation, both within our existing framework and future growth areas".

If you would like to hear more about the positive impact machine translation technology can have on your business, contact us today.

About VistaTEC: (www.vistatec.com)

VistaTEC is a leader in localization, process management and global release strategies. Long considered one of the industry's most innovative, progressive and successful solutions providers VistaTEC counts many of the world's leading organizations amongst its clientele.

Source: VistaTEC email announcement

This month’s newsletter is packed with information that further demonstrates the value of machine translation, and it includes with real-world proof points from users of Asia Online's Language Studio™ technology. The Asia Online team has been very busy attending a number of events and engaging with many LSPs, enterprises and eDiscovery organizations.

The highlight of February was the JABA-Translations Machine Translation Workshop held in beautiful Porto where a group of LSPs gathered for two days to learn from the real-world experience of Joaquim Alves who shared in a very open exchange of information and ideas. Attendees reviewed JABA-Translations' customized English into Portuguese Technical Automotive engine that is delivering improved efficiency with machine translation quality matching productivity levels equivalent to 85% fuzzy match on translation memories.

We also preview more features of the upcoming Language Studio™ V3.0 release. This new release focuses on three key areas: data security and privacy, quality and control. While these issues are important to LSPs, the new features have also been designed from the ground up to address the growing needs for data security and sensitive data processing required by government institutions, security services and financial institutions.

Machine translation has long been seen as a technology that has overpromised and failed to deliver. At Asia Online, we focus on setting realistic expectations with our customers and work to educate the market with case studies and factual examples. It is unfortunate that this view is not shared by all providers of machine translation, many of whom continue to disseminate unrealistic promises well beyond what is practical. This month in a two part special focused on data, we address some of the misinformation and explore many issues that are frequently the cause of confusion for organizations evaluating automated translation technologies. We look at critical data privacy and security issues, and advise on how to protect valuable linguistic data assets when working with third-party service providers and freelancers. We also provide more detail on the benefits of Clean Data SMT and the differences between other so called “clean data” approaches.

Don’t forget to sign up for our free webinar. This month our topic is "Meaningful Metrics for Machine Translation – A Discussion on Best Practice" Asia Online’s CEO, Dion Wiggins will co-host this webinar with Omnilingua Worldwide's Managing Director, Kevin Nelson. Kevin will discuss how to measure and compare productivity with metrics from a recent customized English into Spanish Technical Automotive engine.

1. JABA-Translations Machine Translation Workshop demonstrates MT equivalent to 85% fuzzy match productivity.
2. Language Studio™ eDiscovery Services Well Received at LegalTech Conference
3. Language Studio™ Enterprise V3.0 – A Peek Inside
4. Data Part 1: Privacy and Security
5. Data Part 2: Is It Really "Clean Data" SMT?
6. Lost In Translation

Happy New Year!! This month’s newsletter is packed with information. The Asia Online team wrapped up 2011 on a high note with a number of key partnership and technology relationships. This month we add four new technology partners who  are integrating the Language Studio™ API into their platforms so that translation with Asia Online is a seamless process.

We also secured a relationship with one of Russia’s leading LSPs, Janus Worldwide, for the collaborative development of automated translation systems between English and Russian.

We are also very pleased to announce the launch of our new Language Studio™ Multilingual eDiscovery Services. These services enable providers of eDiscovery analysis, forensics and litigation support services to add complex translation and document processing functionality to their client offerings.

The Asia Online development team has also been hard at work on Version 3 of Language Studio™ Enterprise. A vast number of great new features are being added that increase quality, throughput and improve the amount of control that users have over their custom engines. One of the important enhancements in Language Studio™ V3.0 is the improvements in our on-premise offerings that bulk translators (billions of words per day) such as government, defense and security agencies will find very interesting.

Asia Online recently built its first Language Studio™ custom engine for Hunnect. Hungarian is known to be a very complex language and difficult for machine translation. But as their case study shows, even on their very first project, Hunnect was able to increase margins by 20% and reduce delivery time by 46%, without compromising on quality.

Finally, we have a new section this month called "Industry Buzz on MT" which summarizes many of the key trends and announcements in the industry.

1. Case Study - Hunnect Makes Big ROI Gains on First English to Hungarian Project
2. Language Studio™ adds Bulk eDiscovery Document Translation and Processing Services
3. Janus Worldwide and Asia Online Collaborate for English-Russian Translations
4. Four New Technology Partnerships
5. Coming Soon: Language Studio™ Enterprise V3.0 - Major Updates to our On-Premise Platform Solutions
6. Industry Buzz on MT
   • The Growing Use of Machine Translation
   • Fair Compensation for Post-Editors
   • Sajan Blog Series on Machine Translation
   • Is The Exuberance About DIY MT Warranted?
   • Stanford offers free online courses on Machine Learning and NLP
7. Objections to Machine Translation
8. Lost In Translation

    
News Release
Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Janus Worldwide and Asia Online have signed an agreement to engage in the joint collaborative development of an automated translation solution to improve the efficiency of doing translations from English into Russian.

Janus Worldwide is one of the largest translation companies in Eastern Europe, and was founded in 1996 with a mission to deliver accurate, consistent translation and localization services, with unyielding quality, to the world’s preeminent multinational corporations. In addition to translating material from many subject areas, the company also regularly provides comprehensive linguistic support for its clients, which can include:

• Developing stylistic guidelines
• Independent quality control of Russian-language material
• Term searches and the compilation of glossaries for new projects
• Linguistic consulting on other related matters

Together, we have created a solution that provides translations no less suitable than if the translation had been carried out by a human.             – Dmitry Ulanov, Janus CTO

This partnership is yet another example of a core belief at Asia Online, that the best MT systems are likely to come from partnerships with strategic LSP partners. Asia Online has stated from the outset that the best MT systems come from close collaborations with linguistic experts. Using the large number of high-quality parallel texts that have been carefully gathered and optimized by Janus, and further cleaned and validated by Asia Online, the partnership expects to produce MT systems that surpass other similar MT systems in the market.

This close collaboration between the MT developers at Asia Online, and the linguists and post-editors at Janus provides both the structural analysis and the informed linguistic input, in addition to high quality TM data, to produce superior MT systems. Janus linguists will provide ongoing error analysis and corrective feedback and are expected to develop key linguistic assets, glossaries, stylistic guides and rules to be able to optimize the MT system for the unique needs of different clients. The objective of the partnership will be to ensure that Janus is a cost, productivity and efficiency leader in producing high quality translations for the Russian market initially, and other related languages later.

About Janus Worldwide(www.janusww.com)

Janus Worldwide Inc. is a leading provider of translation and localization services. Offering turn-key solutions, from one-stop translation, graphic design, layout and publishing services to automated workflow and CMS integration and everything in-between. Janus's globalization solutions enable companies to enter new markets with top quality localized products and services that meet the language and functionality requirements of the target audience.

Janus was founded 1996 with a mission to deliver accurate, consistent translation and localization services, with unyielding quality, to the world’s preeminent multinational corporations. Janus's commitment to hiring the best in the business and providing superior customer service has enabled them to build a global reputation as a top-notch language services provider. Janus's responsiveness, global reach, on-budget and on-time deliveries, flexibility in integrating with customer process, and continual cost improvement strategies, have earned them respect from localization stakeholders in software, marketing, tech pubs, training and the executive suite of many Fortune 500 and start-ups alike.

About Asia Online (www.asiaonline.net / www.languagestudio.com)

Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by individual investors and institutional venture capital. Its corporate headquarters are in Singapore, and it has significant operations in Bangkok, Thailand, with R&D activities throughout Asia and expanding sales operations in Europe and North America.

Asia Online has developed technology that enables near-human quality mass translation of text across more than 520 language pairs. The technology is currently being deployed to assist enterprises and language service providers translate large amounts of information into their preferred languages and translate millions of pages of open content into local languages absolutely free to help eliminate information poverty in countries which are under served by such content.

Asia Online won the Red Herring Global 100 Award for "Most Promising Technology Startups" in January 2009 and was profiled recently by Gartner in their report entitled "Cool Vendors in Emerging Technologies, 2009."

This month’s newsletter includes information about three new releases. Asia Online is releasing a new version of the popular Language Studio™ desktop translation tools in addition to support for 6 new language pairs (ENRU, ENAR and DEJA) across the entire Language Studio™ suite of products. Kilgray has also released a new version of MemoQ that directly integrates Language Studio™ Enterprise translations into workflow processes.

The main article in this month’s newsletter focuses on how to measure the quality of machine translation when comparing machine various translation vendors, and it also explores the importance of the measuring quality improvements in translation engines.

Unlike Language Studio™, the quality of most translation engines improves very little after the first version is released. Conversely, Language Studio™ is designed for rapid improvement, with one customer recently receiving a 30 BLEU point increase from a single Incremental Improvement Training.

You don’t need to be a large LSP to benefit from Language Studio™ efficiencies and cost savings. For example, this month we also present a case study of a smaller LSP that has had great success using Language Studio™ custom translation engines. Andovar competed against industry giants SDL and TransPerfect and won several large projects by offering higher quality and a more complete service.

1. New release of Language Studio™ Pro - V3.0
2. Kilgray MemoQ integrated with Language Studio™
3. 6 New Language Pairs
4. Huge Response to ROI and Clean Data Webinars
5. Andovar - Competes Against Industry Giants with Asia Online and Wins
6. A Short Guide to Measuring and Comparing Machine Translation Engines
7. Lost In Translation

Click for the full newsletter

This month’s newsletter focuses on the rapid maturing of machine translation in the market place and the types of solution now on offer. We also discuss how Language Service Providers (LSPs) and enterprises can achieve rapid Return On Investment (ROI) from the unique Language Studio™ clean data strategy, and we summary a case study from Sajan where raw output quality in Simplified Chinese and Spanish is beating first pass human translators.

Many new MT service providers are repackaging open source technology and trying to mimic Asia Online’s Clean Data SMT message. There is nothing wrong per se with open source. Indeed, the open source Moses decoder was mainly developed by Asia Online’s Philipp Koehn and Hieu Hoang at the University of Edinburgh and extended during a Johns Hopkins University Summer Workshop and further developed under EuroMatrix and GALE project funding by many other academics and researchers. Moses is an excellent open source tool. However, using existing open source software alone will not yield the best results. Much higher quality and better ROI can be achieved with the use of proprietary Language Studio™ technology and processes.

1. Asia Online Translates Non-Asian Languages
2. The Maturity of Machine Translation
3. ROI and the Benefits of Clean Data SMT
4. Lost In Translation

Click for the full newsletter

This month's newsletter is packed with information that will help enterprises, content publishers and language service providers to better understand how they can control Machine Translation (MT) quality. This month we are also launching two new products that take advantage of our real-time translation capability. Language Studio™ Multilingual Chat and Language Studio Multilingual Support.

1. New Website
2. Giving LSPs Control of the MT Process
3. The Benefits of Customized MT
4. New Products
5. Asia Online CEO to Deliver Workshop on MT ROI
6. Lost In Translation

Click for the full newsletter

supported by

The Localisation Research Centre (LRC) and the Multilingual Web project's third workshop in the Multilingual Web series will be colocated with the 16th Annual LRC Conference.

These two events will run together from 21-23 September 2011 in Limerick, Ireland and aim to bring together the world's leading experts in localisation, internationalisation and Multilingual Web design and conceptualisation for a series of presentations, talks and workshops. This will give attendees the opportunity to learn about the latest advances and developments in the field of localisation, as well as provide them with the opportunity to participate and have their say in workshops that will contribute towards the future of the Multilingual Web.

Click here for more conference information.

• Requirements for Building a High Quality Near-Human Quality Translation Engine
• Incremental Improvement of Translation Quality
• The Long-Term Benefits of a Good MT engine
• Business opportunities
• Sustainable Revenue Models for LSPs
• The importance of focus when selecting and leveraging a domain
• Generating recurring revenues
• Expanding the scope of translation – Strategic Advantage
• Extending beyond the traditional human translation limitations
• Case Study: Sajan's experience with MT customization

News Release
Monday, August 16, 2010

Asia Online and Across Systems enter a partner agreement to provide open, enterprise-class translation solutions that enable both language service providers and global enterprises to fully integrate human and machine translation into organizations' existing enterprise software solutions like major CMS and ERP systems. Industry analysts expect the global market for translation services to grow rapidly to over $33.7 billion by 2012, and the new partnership allows language technology users to tap into this growth and improve efficiency, while avoiding proprietary, single-vendor lock-in associated with other automated translation workflow management systems.

Singapore, Germany (PRWEB) August 16, 2010 -- With the market for automated translation heating up, Asia Online, a world leader in providing customizable, high quality machine translation platforms, and Across Systems, a developer of enterprise-class translation process management tools, have joined forces as preferred partners to offer end-to-end translation solutions that dynamically link with large enterprise information systems.

This partnership positions Asia Online and Across as enablers of open, standards-based, best-of-breed translation infrastructure and provides the language services industry an alternative to the proprietary single vendor lock-in solutions. Across Systems' products link and manage corporate data for translation, automatically taking information from enterprise-class software such as Content Management Systems (CMS), Document Management Systems (DMS) and even Enterprise Management Systems (ERP) such as SAP. The partnership now takes the number of enterprise-class technology solutions with which Asia Online is integrated to over 40, with Across at the core for interoperability and workflow management.

Our customers demand precision and quality. Asia Online was selected as a preferred partner for automated translation because of its low cost of entry, flexible billing models, ease of customization and support for open standards.

In its new product version v5 SP1, Across has implemented an advanced interface for the incorporation of external MT solutions like those from Asia Online. Thus, for example, text segments that are not found in the Across translation memory can be routed to Asia Online's Language Studio™ Enterprise technology to deliver high quality automated translation or pre-translation for post-processing by a professional translator. Organizations can now seamlessly and efficiently manage the overall localization process, from content creation, adaptation, translation and editing, through to final delivery, - thereby integrating MT as an integrated process step within a translation workflow and taking advantage of all available technologies.

Mr. Daniel Nackovski, president of Across Systems Inc. said "Our customers demand precision and quality. Asia Online was selected as a preferred partner for automated translation because of its low cost of entry, flexible billing models, ease of customization and support for open standards."

According to Mr. Dion Wiggins, CEO of Asia Online, "the partnership provides our customers access to entirely new applications and markets that traditionally were not possible with a human only approach, as well as optimizing the existing human translation space with a man-machine hybrid translation model. The joint offering will allow customers and partners to benefit from solutions that enable translation as a utility, where very large volumes of critical content can be translated at high quality levels in record time." Common Sense Advisory, the leading independent translation industry research group, estimates that the translation services market will grow from US$26.3 billion in 2010 to US$33.7 billion in 2012, with more information progressively processed by highly automated man-machine collaboration platforms like Asia Online and advanced workflow automation tools such as Across. This growth is causing significant changes in the translation services landscape. As basic human translation work becomes more competitive, LSPs are looking at ways to maintain margins, while at the same time address new higher content volume markets. Man-machine automated translation platforms like Asia Online enable customers to address both these needs, by keeping a key human element involved, ensuring that quality levels are maintained or improved. While many automated translation technology vendors have shied away from the professional language services industry due to the high quality levels expected, Asia Online has focused on this industry, listening to and understanding the needs of LSPs. This has enabled Asia Online to create automated language technology and processes designed to not only to meet the language industry requirements, but that also create brand new opportunities where cost and time/volume constraints were previously a barrier.

Asia Online and Across - Enablers of open, standards-based, best-of-breed translation infrastructure and workflow.

When this approach to automated translation is combined with the Across Language Technology platform, the combined offering is a complete best-of-class solution that provides detailed business intelligence, automation of complex workflows, deep project management and control of timelines and quality throughout the lifecycle of localization and large-scale translation projects.

Mr. Wiggins stresses the role of standards and openness in the industry as it expands. "Customers cannot afford to be boxed into proprietary solutions, because these inevitably limit your ability to link directly into clients' existing information systems and therefore limit the scope of service offerings." "There is also a significant economy-of-scale in using open, best-of-breed shared services and resources such as those provided by Across and Asia Online.

Asia Online and Across both offer flexible and fully configurable on-premise based software licenses and software as a service (SaaS) pricing options.

About Across Systems (www.across.net)

Across Systems, based in Karlsbad, Germany, and in Glendale, CA, is the manufacturer of the Across Language Server - the world's leading independent linguistic supply chain technology.

The Across Language Server is a central software platform for all corporate language resources and for controlling translation processes and workflows. The system simplifies, accelerates, and improves the management, coordination, and implementation of translations. The software includes a translation memory, a terminology system, and powerful project management and translation workflow control tools. Product managers, translators, and proofreaders all work in one system, either in-house or via a seamless connection to translation service providers.

The target group includes all who offer or commission professional translations, such as export-oriented medium-sized enterprises, language service departments of international corporations, and professional translation service providers. By using Across, translation costs can be cut drastically, and the investment in Across usually pays off in a very short time.

Hundreds of leading companies including Volkswagen Group, HypoVereinsbank and SMA Solar Technology AG use the Across Language Server as a central platform for language resources and translation processes.

About Asia Online (www.asiaonline.net / www.languagestudio.com)

Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by individual investors and institutional venture capital. Its corporate headquarters are in Singapore, and it has significant operations in Bangkok, Thailand, with R&D activities throughout Asia and expanding sales operations in Europe and North America.

Asia Online has developed technology that enables near-human quality mass translation of text across more than 500 language pairs. The technology is currently being deployed to assist enterprises and language service providers translate large amounts of information into their preferred languages and translate millions of pages of open content into local languages absolutely free to help eliminate information poverty in countries which are under served by such content.

Asia Online won the Red Herring Global 100 Award for "Most Promising Technology Startups" in January 2009 and was profiled recently by Gartner in their report entitled "Cool Vendors in Emerging Technologies, 2009."

News Release
Monday, August 2, 2010

How four translation specialists worked together to create the next generation of LSP

Berlin, Boston, Singapore, Toronto - August 2, 2010 - Milengo, a worldwide language service provider (LSP), has engaged a trio of specialized translation services and technology providers to create an end-to-end translation solution that delivers on the promise of the next generation of translation advances. The new offering combines quality-optimization, workflow management and automated machine-translation with human translation and editing skills to not only increase efficiency, but to also open new markets that were previously not possible with a human only approach.

With the growth in globalization, many new opportunities have become available to enterprises. However barriers remained in terms of cost and efficiencies that prohibited access. Milengo saw an opportunity to leverage recent innovations in technology and translation process management to allow it to expand its capacity and meet market growth, all while constraining its expenses and staff.

“The translation business is poised for a major transformation,” said Renato Beninatto, CEO of Milengo. “As a global provider of translation services, there are more opportunities than ever. However, scaling up to meet the growth is a challenge. We believe service providers need to reassess their business models, business practices and tools in order to survive the increasing demands of clients.”

According to Mr. Beninatto, the demands can be broken into three discrete domains: manageability, to cope with the increase volume of work; effectiveness, to ensure better quality; and efficiency, to reduce costs. In order to address these three domains of business improvement, Milengo brought together three leaders in their respective fields: Clay Tablet, Acrolinx, and Asia Online.

“Rapid globalization has led to an explosion in information, so much so that not all can be localized by humans alone due to cost and time constraints. The vast offerings in knowledge and content available in languages such as English have taken years to produce. Working at the foundations of the content to ensure quality and then combining process and integration with machine and human translation skills is a logical evolutionary step and ultimately creates even more jobs in the industry.” said Gregory Binger, Chairman, Asia Online.

Clay Tablet will provide a comprehensive infrastructure for integration into translation project and content management workflow. Using Clay Tablet, Milengo customers can commission projects, quote, rout and monitor the status of specific translation tasks, and manage documents throughout the entire translation life-cycle. Clay Tablet was selected as it is widely considered the most open, most interconnected platform of its kind in the world.

Acrolinx will ensure that source documents are of sufficient quality to be translated. A chief cause of poorly translated documents is poor source documents. By leveraging Acrolinx’s services and managing the process automatically through the Clay Tablet infrastructure into the Asia Online machine translation engines, Milengo has been able to demonstrate a significantly higher quality output.

Asia Online provides a state-of-the-art, customizable automated machine translation platform. Milengo utilizes this platform seamlessly through the Clay Tablet infrastructure to create first pass (raw), near-human level translations. These raw translations are then automatically routed to the appropriate human post-editors that use Asia Online’s integrated post-editing suite to not only ensure final document quality, but to also provide feedback into the Asia Online translation engine, ensuring continual quality improvement. By leaving the bulk of translation to the automated systems, and allowing human translators to focus on the nuances of translation, Milengo is able to both increase its capacity and reduce overall costs, further enabling even more translation.

“While there are some vendors that claim they can deliver a start-to-finish solution for translation, the truth is that all are missing essential aspects that limit future growth,” said Mr. Beninatto. “We decided to look for the best of breed offerings – those that not only provided excellence in their field, but also those that were based on open standards. Because they are standards-based, Clay Tablet, Acrolinx and Asia Online all work together seamlessly.”

How the Solution Evolved

Milengo had been increasingly involved in bulk translation projects stemming from Internet-based services, such as technical support help-desks and knowledge management systems. These types of projects frequently involved public documents and comments and there was as pressing need to make this information available in multiple languages.

In order to cope with the ever increasing volume of documents from these projects, Milengo embarked on a Machine Translation pilot project to translate content generated by the public and send it to support staff. Using Asia Online’s automated machine translation platform, public questions were translated from a subset of languages into English, and the support articles and FAQs were translated from English into six languages.

Asia Online worked with Milengo to develop a customized engine that was optimized to handle the complexities of both technical information, and also the less formal structure of public questions.

During this pilot, Milengo and Asia Online identified that the quality of source documents had a big impact on the resulting translation quality. An experiment was conducted where source documents were processed by Acrolinx. The resulting improvements in raw machine translation were so positive, that this source document quality control was adopted for all projects, not just those involving public sources of information.

In order to automate and manage the entire translation process, Clay Tablet provided a connector that allowed the client’s website content to be automatically passed to Acrolinx, then to Asia Online for automated translation, and then into post-editing by Milengo’s global pool of translators. Most importantly, post-editing information is captured and returned back into the machine translation platform to improve quality.

Key findings

• Customize automated machine translation engines to the client’s domains and engage in a continual and well-integrated improvement cycle. As time goes on, the machine translation engine becomes increasingly accurate.
• Address document quality issues early in the translation process to maximize efficiency of the machine translation / human post-editing phase.
• Only adopt solutions that support open standards to ensure that all services and products can integrate seamlessly.
• Streamline the project management of translation to eliminate as much manual human labor as possible, especially with regards to managing documents.
• Choose best of breed solutions and understand how they work together.

About acrolinx (www.acrolinx.com)

acrolinx is the world's leading provider of Information Quality Management solutions. More than 60 blue-chip customers worldwide, such as Cisco, IBM, Siemens, Philips, an d Caterpillar, rely on acrolinx in their information development process. The flagship product acrolinx IQ™ has rapidly become the leading quality management solution for high-value content. Its competitive edge is the award-winning linguistic technology. See www.acrolinx.com for more information.

About Asia Online (www.asiaonline.net / www.languagestudio.com)

Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by individual investors and institutional venture capital. Its corporate headquarters are in Singapore, and it has significant operations in Bangkok, Thailand, with R&D activities throughout Asia and expanding sales operations in Europe and North America.

Asia Online has developed technology that enables near-human quality mass translation of text across more than 500 language pairs. The technology is currently being deployed to assist enterprises and language service providers translate large amounts of information into their preferred languages and translate millions of pages of open content into local languages absolutely free to help eliminate information poverty in countries which are under served by such content.

About Clay Tablet Technologies (www.Clay-Tablet.com)

Clay Tablet Technologies’ unique translation integration software, Clay Tablet 2.5, easily connects any number of content management systems to any translation system or provider.

Clients immediately benefit from Clay Tablet 2.5 with improved translation process efficiency, making it significantly faster and easier to set up, manage, send and retrieve translation projects.

Based in Toronto, Canada, Clay Tablet works exclusively with a global channel partner network of technology vendors, translation service providers and system integrators.

About Milengo (www.milengo.com)

Milengo delivers translation and related localization services to the world’s most successful, international businesses. Its team of over 350 in-house translators, project managers, engineers and more work alongside clients from 19 offices located across the Americas, Europe and Asia.

News Release
Wednesday, January 27, 2010

New Partnership Model and the Benefits of a Combined Technology and Language Services Solution.

Brno, Czech Republic (PRWEB) January 27, 2010 -- Moravia Worldwide, a leading globalization solution provider, and Asia Online, a leader in automated machine translation technology, announced today their upcoming free live webinar titled "Asia Online and Moravia Worldwide: A New Model for Partnerships in Machine Translation Services."

Scheduled for Tuesday February 16, 2010, this 60-minute webinar will provide insights into the current applications of machine translation and how the effective combination of linguistic services and MT technologies best helps realize the potential that machine translation offers today.

The webinar will focus on the key aspects of MT system deployment and how the Asia Online/Moravia partnership leverages the strengths of both at each step.

Presented by Bob Myers, Moravia's Chief Operating Officer, and Kirti Vashee, Asia Online's Vice President of Enterprise Translation Sales, the webinar will focus on the key aspects of MT system deployment and how the Asia Online/Moravia partnership leverages the strengths of both at each step. This includes: • Planning • Corpus organization and cleanup • Engine training • Integration with existing systems • Quality evaluation and tuning • Pilot operation • Post-editing standards and issues

The webinar will also include a demonstration of aspects of Asia Online's Language Studio™ platform suite and of the overall machine translation process, including Language Studio Enterprise™ (core translation server platform), Language Studio™ Pro (SMT data analysis and preparation, project management, translation workflow), Language Studio™ Editor (integrated quality control and post-editing workflow) and Language Studio™ PowerTrain (SMT translation engine building).

The webinar will conclude with practical recommendations for companies that are considering implementing MT, or who are looking to improve their existing MT use.

The webinar will be held on Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 11:00 EDT (8:00 PDT, 17:00 CET). Space is limited. Reserve your webinar seat now. After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Asia Online and Moravia Worldwide formed a partnership in October 2009, designed to provide clients with value-added automated translation solutions based on Asia Online's Language Studio™ platform and Moravia's linguistic and technology services. The two companies teamed up to serve customers with high-volume translation needs across a range of quality requirements and areas of specialization. As part of the partnership, Moravia was designated a "Center of Excellence" for provision of the Asia Online statistical machine translation (SMT) platform and services.

About Moravia Worldwide (http://www.moraviaworldwide.com)

Moravia Worldwide is a leading globalization solution provider, enabling companies in the information technology, e-learning, and life sciences industries to succeed in global markets with high quality multilingual products. Moravia's solutions include localization and product testing services, internationalization, multilingual publishing, technical translation and content creation. Moravia Worldwide maintains global headquarters in the Czech Republic and North American headquarters in California, with local offices and production centers in Japan, China, Argentina, Ireland, USA and throughout Europe.

About Asia Online (www.asiaonline.net / www.languagestudio.com)

Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by individual investors and institutional venture capital. Its corporate headquarters are in Singapore, and it has significant operations in Bangkok, Thailand, with R&D activities throughout Asia and expanding sales operations in Europe and North America.

Asia Online has developed technology that enables near-human quality mass translation of text across more than 500 language pairs. The technology is currently being deployed to assist enterprises and language service providers translate large amounts of information into their preferred languages and translate millions of pages of open content into local languages absolutely free to help eliminate information poverty in countries which are under served by such content.

Asia Online won the Red Herring Global 100 Award for “Most Promising Technology Startups” in January 2009 and was profiled recently by Gartner in their report entitled “Cool Vendors in Emerging Technologies, 2009.”

News Release
Friday, January 15, 2010

Singapore, 15 January 2010. Asia Online has entered into a strategic partnership with LexisNexis Univentio to translate millions of patent documents between Asian and European languages. Not only does this agreement give LexisNexis Univentio premier access to Asia Online’s entire Language Studio™ suite of automated translation products, it also includes access to Language Studio™ PowerTrain technology that allows constant improvement in translation quality for highly customized translation engines.

Full access to Asia Online’s Language Studio™ suite of language and translation technologies allows LexisNexis Univentio to build highly customized translation engines. Starting with one of the most difficult languages for machines to translate, Japanese, LexisNexis Univentio will progressively translate patents and related information across multiple Asian and European languages.

Improving Quality of Content

Andrew Rufener, Chief Operating Officer, LexisNexis Univentio, says, “This deal addresses the challenges faced by all global content providers. The ever increasing volumes of content is one such challenge. The need to provide quality translations for new content as quickly as possible from a multitude of source languages to multiple target languages is another. Asia Online’s Language Studio™ will allow us to translate and disseminate patent documents in multiple languages within 24 hours after publication in their original language and thus make this content accessible to a global audience. English is currently our backbone language, with patents being translated into English from other languages. However, the demand for access to global patent information in non-English speaking markets is growing rapidly.”

This deal addresses the challenges faced by all global content providers. The ever increasing volumes of content is one such challenge.

Asia Online’s technology addresses multiple language directions while maintaining complete control over process and quality. The Language Studio™ suite of products addresses the challenges of bulk translation and the need for constant quality improvement while maintaining control with its unique quality improvement lifecycle that allows the technology to constantly learn from post editing and feedback.

Patents: Notoriously Difficult

Our strategic partnership with LexisNexis Univentio is a key part of Asia Online’s strategy to reshape the economics of translation, especially bulk translation.

According to Asia Online Chief Executive Officer, Dion Wiggins, “Patents are notoriously difficult to translate because they contain both specialized legal terminology and highly complex technical information covering many different domains, from science and medical to engineering and information technology. Asia Online’s Language Studio™ suite of products overcomes these challenges by automating the creation of highly customized translation engines.

Mr Wiggins concludes, “Our strategic partnership with LexisNexis Univentio is a key part of Asia Online’s strategy to reshape the economics of translation, especially bulk translation. By providing tools, processes and a partnership mentality, we help our clients expand their markets and services on a global scale.”

More information contact: Asia Online: Kirti Vashee - +1 (424) 229-2714 (GMT -8)

About Asia Online (www.asiaonline.net / www.languagestudio.com)

Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by individual investors and institutional venture capital. Its corporate headquarters are in Singapore, and it has significant operations in Bangkok, Thailand, with R&D activities throughout Asia and expanding sales operations in Europe and North America.

Asia Online has developed technology that enables near-human quality mass translation of text across more than 500 language pairs. The technology is currently being deployed to assist enterprises and language service providers translate large amounts of information into their preferred languages and translate millions of pages of open content into local languages absolutely free to help eliminate information poverty in countries which are under served by such content.

Asia Online won the Red Herring Global 100 Award for “Most Promising Technology Startups” in January 2009 and was noted recently by Gartner in their report entitled “Cool Vendors in Emerging Technologies, 2009”

About LexisNexis Univentio (www.lexisnexis.com/ip)

LexisNexis Univentio is a member of the LexisNexis group of companies. Since 2005 the company has focused on providing software, systems and content for online intellectual property (IP) research based on leading-edge database and data processing technologies. LexisNexis Univentio owns the largest global commercial and electronically accessible collection of patent information. LexisNexis Univentio provides the content for key LexisNexis intellectual property solutions including LexisNexis® TotalPatent™.

    
News Release
Monday, October 19, 2009

Moravia Worldwide, a leading globalization solution provider, and Asia Online, a leader in automated machine translation technology, announced today the formation of a partnership designed to provide Moravia's clients with value-added automated translation solutions based on Asia Online's Language StudioTM platform. As part of the partnership, Moravia was designated a "Center of Excellence" for provision of the Asia Online statistical machine translation (SMT) platform and services.

The partnership combines Asia Online's innovative translation technology, covering hundreds of language pairs, with Moravia's expertise in solution development, project management, corpus management, language quality systems, workflow, and post-editing. The two companies will team up to serve customers with high-volume translation needs across a range of quality requirements and areas of specialization. The partnership carries through on Moravia's commitment to provide a wide range of language solutions tailored to its clients' needs.

The two companies will team up to serve customers with high-volume translation needs across a range of quality requirements and areas of specialization.

Moravia Worldwide boasts significant expertise in a wide range of technologies supporting global content management, including translation management systems (TMS), translation automation and workflow solutions. The company has conducted research and invested in the use of machine translation over the past few years, establishing expertise with several different machine translation (MT) technologies. The partnership announced today augments Moravia's current suite of services related to machine translation, including post-editing and machine translation evaluation and deployment. The company has successfully worked with a number of global technology leaders providing consultation and solution development services.

"I am excited to be taking this next big step into the realm of translation automation," said Arturo Quintero, Chief Corporate Strategist at Moravia Worldwide. "As we have been developing our own MT capabilities, we have seen Asia Online rapidly emerging as a leader in statistical machine translation technologies. Together with Moravia's technical and linguistic expertise, we will be able to serve clients who need large volumes of content translated, or, who have content that wouldn't otherwise be translated."

The partnership provides Moravia Worldwide with preferred access to the entire Asia Online Language StudioTM platform suite, including Language StudioTM Enterprise (the core translation server platform), Language StudioTM Pro (SMT data analysis and preparation, project management, translation workflow), Language StudioTM Post Edit (integrated quality control and post-editing workflow) and Language StudioTM PowerTrain (translation engine customization), as well as APIs that allow Moravia to integrate the Language StudioTM platform into its clients' existing systems. Moravia will also contribute to the ongoing development of Asia Online's platform by providing recommendations for feature and functionality improvements, feedback regarding productivity tools and testing of pre-release versions.

The partnership provides Moravia Worldwide with preferred access to the entire Asia Online Language StudioTM platform suite.

Client solutions can be configured to operate with Asia Online's Language StudioTM Enterprise translation engines hosted at Moravia, or by the client, or alternatively as software as a service (SaaS). Furthermore, Moravia will be able to help clients quickly and economically build translation engines using Asia Online's Language StudioTM PowerTrain solution, and assist them in maximizing translation throughput and quality control with integrated post-editing tools.

Mr. Kirti Vashee, Enterprise Translation Sales at Asia Online, believes the new partnership will provide significant benefits for clients with specialized, bulk translation needs. "Moravia has a well deserved reputation of providing excellent processes and quality control for clients with sophisticated translation needs. They are the perfect partner for helping organizations take advantage of the Language StudioTM suite of products to create high-quality automated translation engines for very specific needs," said Mr. Vashee.

"Building a cost-effective and high quality engine requires the linguistic skills that Moravia brings to the table, proven procedures and methodologies that are embedded within the Language Studio platform, and tools to automate the cleaning and preparation of data. Moravia will be able to guide its clients through the entire customization process."

One of the most significant benefits of Language Studio^TM Enterprise is its ability to extend the reach of translation services. Common Sense Advisory, a leading translation market research firm, claims that just 0.5% of what could be translated is being translated. This un-translated content includes patents, self-service knowledge bases, community support forums, academic research, research reports, corporate information, and client communications. Because these valuable sources of information often amount to many millions of words, they are only partially localized due to the costs and time required. By utilizing Language Studio^TM Enterprise to rapidly generate raw translations and then Asia Online's workflow and post editing tools to manage quality, organizations can take on much larger and inherently more complex projects that were previously out of reach.

News Release
Monday, October 12, 2009

Asia Online releases a new hybrid statistical machine translation platform that will open entirely new markets for Language Service Providers by dramatically altering the cost and investment required to undertake massive, high-volume translation projects

Language Studio™ Enterprise is priced as low as a fraction of a cent per word as volumes increase

Singapore – 12 October 2009 (PRWEB) Asia Online today released Language Studio™ Enterprise, its second-generation hybrid Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) platform for enterprises and Language Service Providers (LSPs) that have large-scale translation requirements and a need to control the costs associated with high-volume globalization and localization projects. Language Studio™ Enterprise, allows LSPs and organizations to take on translation initiatives that previously would have been uneconomical from a time and cost perspective.

In addition to hosted and on-premises versions, Language Studio™ Enterprise is available as Software as a Service – meaning that LSPs and enterprises can immediately begin accessing all features on demand via secure web services without the need to procure and run an expensive server infrastructure or maintain dedicated computers. Several hundred language pairs are supported, including all 23 official European Union languages and a range of Asian languages such as Thai, Chinese and Japanese. Other Asian languages are being released in the near future.

Langue Studio Opens New Markets for LSPs

Language Studio™ Enterprise builds upon Asia Online’s established technologies and adds a range of new features, including:

• Cloud-based scalability: Clients’ custom translation engines can be loaded across as many translation servers on an as needed basis to deliver results in record time.

• Support for multiple source document formats: HTML, XML, TXT, DOC, DOCX, TMX and XLIFF.

• Support for custom engines LSPs and enterprises may build custom translation engines for specific customers or specialist industries on top of the existing baseline engines. Custom engines deliver significantly higher quality translations than generalized engines. With enhancements and optimizations in the Language Studio™ Suite, LSPs are able to create custom engines with as little as 20,000 segments of learning data.

• Multiple domain support: Domains such as “News & Commentary,” “Technology & High-Tech” and “Medical & Healthcare” may be selected to ensure the highest possible quality and accuracy of translations. Having foundation domain data ready to use, rapidly jump-start’s the creation of custom domains and engines.

Kirti Vashee, VP Enterprise Translation Sales at Asia Online says, “Profit margins in the language services industry are low while competition is intense, even cut throat at times. Productivity gains when post-editing high-quality output from Language Studio™ Enterprise can exceed 300%. Professional translators and post editors have been seen to increase their translation throughput to 12,000 words per day or more in specialized industries. This dramatic rise in productivity allows them to compete more effectively while improving their margins.”

Language Studio™ Opens New Markets

Language Studio™ Enterprise not only lowers costs and increases productivity, but also greatly extends the reach of translation services for LSPs into vast new markets. Common Sense Advisory, a leading translation market research firm, claims that just 0.5% of the information that could be translated is being translated. This untranslated content currently includes patents, self-service knowledge bases, community support forums, academic research, research reports, corporate information and client communications. Because these valuable sources of information often contain many millions of words, they are only partially localized or not localized at all due to the costs and time required. By utilizing Language Studio™ Enterprise to rapidly generate initial translations and then using Asia Online’s workflow and post editing tools to refine and manage quality, LSPs can take on much larger and inherently more complex projects that were previously infeasible.

“Language Studio™ Enterprise is priced as low as a fraction of a cent per word as volumes increase,” says Mr. Vashee. “This changes the financial equation, allowing LSPs to reap the benefits of a large-scale, industrial-strength machine translation platform, without the cost outlay that has been associated with creating custom translation engines previously. This means LSPs can take on new business in markets never before addressed. It allows LSPs to focus on and add value in the emerging ’massive volume - good enough quality‘ market.”

Options for Obtaining Language Studio™ Enterprise

Language Studio™ Enterprise is available immediately in the following versions:

• Software as a Service: All technology is run and managed by Asia Online in an on-demand environment, with clients running their translation tasks via the web. This is the most economical and flexible model for LSPs and enterprises with a broad range of translation needs.

• Hosted: The client has a dedicated set of servers that are run and managed by Asia Online. This solution is ideal for organizations whose clients demand a dedicated translation environment.

• On-Premises: Asia Online installs dedicated server software at a site of the client’s choosing and provides training and support to allow the client to run and manage the software. This option is ideal for organizations with high-security requirements.

Language Studio™ Enterprise also has a flexible API, allowing for tight integration to existing workflow environments and custom applications.

More information on the Language Studio™ Suite is available at www.languagestudio.com.

About Asia Online (www.asiaonline.net)

Asia Online Pte Ltd is an International web portal and machine translation technology company.

Asia Online’s translation services are targeted towards mass translators and the global language services industry. Asia Online's primary focus is to support the delivery of huge amounts of content in local languages. In doing so it has created a core technological infrastructure that enables massive translation projects to be undertaken. Asia Online is working with language service providers and publishers with its unique infrastructure to create technology capable of producing the best machine translation quality that is second to none.

Formed in 2006, Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by individual investors and institutional venture capital. Its corporate headquarters are in Singapore, and it has significant operations in Bangkok, Thailand, with R&D activities throughout Asia and expanding sales operations in Europe and North America.

News Release
Wednesday, August 29, 2009

New study into Automated Language Translation highlights need for clean and normalized data when sharing data. In cooperation with the Translation Automation User Society (TAUS), Asia Online conducted an experiment to determine the optimum approaches for building statistical machine translation (SMT) engines with shared data. The findings indicate that significant improvements in translation machine quality can be achieved with smaller pools of shared, clean data.

Ottawa, Canada (PRWEB) August 26, 2009 -- Conducted in early 2009, Asia Online, in cooperation with TAUS, conducted an extensive experiment to determine the optimum way to build a statistical machine translation (SMT) engines with pooled data resources. Development of SMT engines have been hindered by the lack of sufficient amounts of training data and this experiment provides guidance on best practices for using and sharing pooled data resources. The final analysis and report is now available for download.

For the purposes of the experiment, three TAUS member companies in the same industry domain provided sets of training data to develop SMT engines. Each company was a multinational software organization. Asia Online performed extensive analysis on the data and created a total of 29 separate SMT engines by combining the data from the three companies in various configurations. It then performed evaluations of the output quality of all 29 engines using the BLEU and the F-Measure metrics. According to Kirti Vashee, Asia Online's VP of Enterprise Translation Sales, the study is of particular importance to organizations looking at ways to constrain the costs associated with large localization projects, and considering data sharing as a means to accomplish this. "While SMT holds great promise in reducing the overall cost and increasing the throughput of globalization initiatives, the cost/complexity of creating a SMT engine has been a barrier, mainly because of the large volumes of training data that are needed. General wisdom holds that, the more data available when training the engine, the higher the translation quality of the SMT engine. However, just how much data is needed and of what type had not been rigorously tested or understood. This study dispels some myths about what is really needed to build a quality SMT engine and provides some evidence for what does work."

"Making industrial-strength machine translation available on-demand," Kirti Vashee, Vice President of Sales, Americas and Europe for Asia Online

Making industrial-strength machine translation available on-demand

"The study shows that clean and normalized training data is key to high-quality translation output when building SMT engines. Therefore, activities associated with normalization and data cleaning should be integrated into best practices. Other related research, suggests that as little as 10% of the data in an unclean format can have a negative impact on translation quality. " said Mr. Vashee.

Key Finding 1: The best results are achieved by combining clean, mostly normalized sets of data. In general, un-normalized raw translation memory (TM) data produces lower-quality engines than engines built with clean normalized data. Significantly, more un-normalized data is required to get similar quality translation output as engines built with much smaller amounts of clean normalized data.

Put simply, this means that for most organizations, effort should be placed on preparing (and / or sharing) pools of consistent, clean normalized data rather than just attempting to locate large amounts of raw data.

Key Finding 2: The use of consolidated raw normalized data only improves engine quality when terminology is highly consistent across the shared data sets. Thus, focus on terminological consistency is likely to yield significant benefits. This also means that there is much less measurable benefit to using consolidated data with un-normalized raw data. In fact, adding non-normalized raw data to a smaller pool of normalized clear data can negatively impact the final engine quality.

For organizations looking to share or pool data, this suggests that each contributing set of data needs to be analyzed, cleaned and normalized before meaningful benefits occur.

Key Finding 3: The addition of clean baseline datasets can improve the fluency of the final translations and fill gaps in vocabulary that were not in the training datasets.

In conclusion, the study reveals that the quality and type of training data matters. Small amounts of clean training data can produce better quality engines than possible with much larger amounts of raw translation memory data. However, data volume is also a key driver for quality and large amounts of even moderately dirty data could, at some point, surpass the systems built on very small amounts of clean data. But given the same amount of training data, clean normalized datasets will always provide higher-quality results

The report, entitled Study on the Impact of Data Consolidation and Sharing for Statistical Machine Translation is available for download.

About Asia Online
Asia Online Pte. is an International web portal and Machine Translation technology company.

Asia Online's unique services enable people to transcend language as a barrier to knowledge by providing unrivaled access to the limitless store of English-language content on the Internet, in their language of choice.

Our mission is quite simple: to develop and apply solutions to unite communities across language barriers for ten Asian languages and more than twenty three European languages. The company's currently boasts support for more than 500 different language pairs, including Asian and European languages, which it offers both as a product and via its online enterprise translation portal. Translation services are targeted towards mass translators and the global language services industry.

Asia Online's primary focus delivers huge amounts of content in local languages. In doing so it has created a core technological infrastructure that enables massive translation projects to be undertaken. Asia Online is working with language service providers and publishers with its unique infrastructure that facilitates the ongoing evolution of real time corrective improvements that aims to deliver machine translation quality that is second to none.

Formed in 2006, Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by a number of individual investors and institutional venture capital. It is headquartered in Singapore, with operational headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand, from where it conducts R&D and daily business operations. Asia Online currently employs more than 400 full and part time staff and is in the process of being incorporated in an additional 10 Asian countries.

News Release
Monday, June 8, 2009

Asia Online, a leader in automated translation technology, has unveiled Language Studio Lite^TM, a sophisticated suite of tools that enable language service providers to evaluate translated texts and also prepare data for use with automated translation machines. Language Studio Lite^TM is offered free of charge and can greatly speed up the preparation of documents for translation and provides detailed analysis of translated documents.

Berlin / Thailand June 8, 2009 -- Asia Online, a leader in automated translation technology, today announced the availability of Language Studio Lite^TM, a suite of software tools designed to assist in the preparation of translation data and to provide sophisticated, industry-standard analysis of the quality of translated documents.

Language Studio Lite^TM, which is available free of charge from the Asia Online Translation Portal web site, will aid individuals, organizations and Language Service Providers (LSPs) involved in globalization projects by providing, for the first time ever, a unified and integrated suite of standards-based tools that perform essential data preparation tasks and analysis of translation quality.

Mr. Wiggins, CEO of Asia Online says, "In a world that is increasingly globalized, translating and managing documents in multiple languages is essential. Language Service Providers , corporations and governments spend billions of dollars each year on translation services. Asia Online's mission is to improve the productivity of language professionals throughout the translation lifecycle by providing enabling technologies. Language Studio LiteTM is part of this strategy." "Language Studio LiteTM provides a range of tools that translation professions desperately need, but until now have had to cobble together from disparate, non-standard and sometimes expensive sources," says Mr. Wiggins.

Language Studio LiteTM provides a range of tools that translation professions desperately need, but until now have had to cobble together from disparate, non-standard and sometimes expensive sources.

Language Studio Lite^TM is a tool for both business users and translation professionals, and is a practical option for a standardized means of Translation Quality Evaluation (TQE). Language Studio Lite^TM produces high-quality HTML reports and even exports results Microsoft Excel formats.

Asia Online Language Studio Lite^TM is available as a free download from the Asia Online Translation Software Tools Download Page.

Features of Language Studio Lite^TM

Translation Quality Evaluations - TQE

In order to alleviate subjectivity when examining the quality of translations, Asia Online Language Studio Lite^TM has standardized the most common industry metrics into a single tool. Currently, Language Studio Lite^TM provides TQE metrics for: BLEU score, F-Measure and Translation Error Rate (TER). Using these metrics, language professionals can gain a firm understanding of translation quality and quickly identify areas that require improvement.

Translation Data Preparation Tools

Asia Online Language Studio Lite^TM provides a quick and simple means to analyze and manipulate text in the following ways:

Word Count: Analyze text for the number of words and number of unique words, which is useful for estimating the size and complexity of a translation task. It also has the added advantage of being able to count the number of words in one side of a TMX (Translation Memory eXchange) file.

Line/Segment Count: Analyzes text to determine how many lines in a TXT (text) or TMX file.

Sentence Count: Analyzes the number of sentences in a document and the average number of words per sentence.

Extract and Merge: Extracts data from TMX, XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format) and Tabbed Pair file formats.

Convert: Converts data between TMX, XLIFF and Tabbed Pair formats. N-Gram: Identifies and counts N-Grams in text files, plus allows for merging of N-Gram files, and counts and matches N-Grams to a word list. This is an important task for improving translation quality, as quality N-gram models are used by statistical natural language processing as part of the automated translation process.

About Asia Online
(www.asiaonline.net)

Asia Online's unique services enable people to transcend language as a barrier to knowledge by providing unrivalled access to the limitless store of English-language content on the Internet, in their language of choice.

Asia Online's primary focus delivers huge amounts of content in local languages. In doing so it has created a core technological infrastructure that enables massive translation projects to be undertaken. Asia Online is working with language service providers and publishers with its unique infrastructure that facilitates the ongoing evolution of real time corrective improvements aimed at delivering machine translation quality second to none.

Formed in 2007, Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by a number of individual investors and institutional venture capital. Its headquarters are in Singapore, with operational headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand, where it conducts R&D and daily business operations.

News Release
Monday, March 25, 2009

Asia Online today announced it has received second-round funding from T-ONE CAPITAL. The new investment will be used to further sales and marketing of its world-leading automated statistical machine translation platform and to expand its efforts to eliminate language as a barrier to knowledge and global business.

Bangkok, Thailand, May 25, 2009 -- Asia Online, a leader in automated translation technologies and services, today announced that T-ONE CAPITAL has become the company's second institutional investor.

T-ONE CAPITAL's investment is an important milestone for Asia Online and is a key step in the validation and execution of the company's vision to deliver large volumes of local language content to the non-English speaking world. Asia Online has been delivering on its promise to provide unique services that enable[s] people to transcend language as a barrier to knowledge, and had previously raised its first-round investment from JAIC.

It has embarked upon "The World's Largest Literacy Project" and, starting with the Thai language, is providing access to information sources such as Wikipedia and the CIA World Fact Book in Asian languages via its automated statistical machine translation platform.

"We are very pleased to invest in Asia Online and look forward to a close partnership with the business to support its future growth," said Mr. Boriboon Amratisha, of T-ONE CAPITAL. "Asia Online is transforming the way people communicate by overcoming the limitations imposed by language on the way we do business and access knowledge on the internet." Mr. Dion Wiggins, CEO of Asia Online, said the company's efforts to bridge the information poverty gap have resulted in the development of unique technology and translation processes that are unrivaled. "Based upon our efforts to translate millions pages of valuable educational content into Thai - one of the toughest languages in the world for automated translation - we have developed an extremely powerful automated translation platform and all of the tools, processes and services needed to dramatically lower the cost of bulk translation projects."

Asia Online is transforming the way people communicate by overcoming the limitations imposed by language on the way we do business and access knowledge on the internet.

Over the past year, Asia Online has evolved its proprietary technology and processes into a unified automated translation platform for businesses with bulk translation needs. According to Mr. Wiggins, the platform is currently returning high-quality, near-human results for a large number of language pairs, including Chinese to English, English to Spanish, English to French and many other language pair combinations. This support for a large variety of Asian and European languages has already netted the company a variety of projects to build customized statistical translation machine engines.

"We have been constantly evolving the Asia Online automated translation platform to further increase quality and performance," said Mr. Wiggins. "Our goal has been to improve not just the translation quality of the platform, but also to optimize the entire process of large-scale globalization projects."

To achieve the best translation quality, statistical machine translation engines are customized for specific purposes. For example, Asia Online has worked with Language Service Provider clients to build customized engines for translating technical and automotive documentation. However, building such engines has traditionally required large quantities of bi-lingual training data. Gathering large amounts of bi-lingual data can be a heavy burden for organizations, especially those seeking to translate between European and Asian languages.

"Much of our effort has been directed to overcoming barriers to machine translation," said Mr. Wiggins. "Extensive research with multiple sources, including TAUS and key Language Service Providers, has validated that our 'clean data' approach with streamlined data preparation and normalization processes reduce the need for bi-lingual data to as little as 1/100th of the 'dirty data' approach required by other solutions in the industry. Better still, projects that used to take months now take only weeks. The result is that we have been able to dramatically reduce the total costs and time associated with translation projects."

About Asia Online
(www.asiaonline.net)

Asia Online's unique services enable people to transcend language as a barrier to knowledge by providing unrivalled access to the limitless store of English-language content on the Internet, in their language of choice.

Asia Online's primary focus delivers huge amounts of content in local languages. In doing so it has created a core technological infrastructure that enables massive translation projects to be undertaken. Asia Online is working with language service providers and publishers with its unique infrastructure that facilitates the ongoing evolution of real time corrective improvements aimed at delivering machine translation quality second to none.

Formed in 2007, Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by a number of individual investors and institutional venture capital. Its headquarters are in Singapore, with operational headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand, where it conducts R&D and daily business operations.

About T-ONE CAPITAL.

T-ONE CAPITAL is an investment company owned jointly by Tonson Group and BBTV. Tonson Group is a diversified investment company building a portfolio of long-term holdings in high-performing assets and businesses in Thailand and around the world. Tonson Group was established in 2006 and is part of the BBTV Group family of businesses. BBTV operates and owns a range of companies including Thailand's Channel 7 TV station.