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Tongue Twisters - Asia Online and Clay Tablet intertwine CMS with SMT
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News Release
Thursday, June 26, 2008 |
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Asia Online and Clay Tablet technologies agree to link Asia
Online's Statistical Machine Translation platform to the popular Clay Tablet 2.0
system to allow seamless integration with enterprises content management and translation
management solutions. The agreement effectively enables any content in an organization's
CMS to be translated into more than 200 different language pairs.
Bangkok / Toronto June 26, 2008 -- Clay Tablet technologies and Asia Online
today announced they will jointly develop integration between Asia Online's Statistical
Machine Translation platform and Clay Tablet 2.0, which is the industry's leading
solution for managing the connection between translation solutions and the enterprise.
According to Robinson Kelly, CEO of Clay Tablet, the agreement will ensure that
organizations can readily access Asia Online's industrial-strength statistical machine
translation platform as part of their ongoing business processes.
"We're very excited about Asia Online's unique approach to machine translation and
helping them quickly connect this new technology to a broad range of Content Management
and Translation Management systems," says Mr. Kelly.
In all cases, greater efficiency is the goal. Clay Tablet
automates the flow of content between all involved systems, extending the vision
of greater translation efficiency that machine translation promises.
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Asia Online recently announced its Statistical Machine Translation platform that
learns from humans in real time. The platform can perform translations in over 200
language pairs including German-French, German-Spanish, German Portuguese, English-Hindi,
English-Spanish, English-Thai, English-Chinese, etc. It has been designed to handle
massive volumes of text for large-scale, bulk translation projects and also for
high-traffic, real-time environments. The platform is ideal for many of Clay Tablet's
enterprise clients and language service provider partners, who are engaged in projects
that are either too large for humans to do alone in a cost effective and practical
manner, or are time sensitive and need to be translated quickly.
"Machine Translation is quickly becoming a 'must have' component in many globalization
initiatives, either as stand-alone technology or as part of a multi-step process
that also leverages human translation," commented Mr. Kelly. "In all cases, greater
efficiency is the goal. Clay Tablet automates the flow of content between all involved
systems, extending the vision of greater translation efficiency that machine translation
promises."
With Clay Tablet 2.0, enterprises' Content Management Solutions may be quickly connected
to Asia Online's statistical machine translation platform, allowing for rapid translation
of content, either in bulk or on an as-needed basis. Furthermore, corrections made
by human proofreaders during the editing process will also be passed back to the
Asia Online platform and used to train the translation engine in real time.
Dion Wiggins, CEO of Asia Online, explains: "One of the biggest reasons for poor-quality
machine translation is poor-quality training data for the engine and an inability
to retrain the system when it makes a mistake. Asia Online has a suite of tools
and processes to help organizations clean and format large amounts their corporate
information for use as training data when tailoring the Asia Online platform to
their needs. They can then further improve translation quality through our human-machine
feedback loop."
"Since most corporate data exists in a multitude of different formats in enterprise
CMSs, having a single solution like Clay Tablet to connect enterprise content, to
humans and our statistical machine translation platform is optimal. It closes the
loop on not only the translation of content, but also of training and improving
the statistical machine translation platform to meet an organization's specific
needs," concluded Mr. Wiggins.
About Asia Online Pte Ltd
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 is to deliver 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 2007, Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by a number of individual
investors and institutional venture capital. Its corporate headquarters are in Singapore,
and its operational headquarters are in Bangkok, Thailand, where it conducts R&D
and daily business operations. Asia Online currently employs more than 180 staff
and is in the process of being incorporated in an additional 10 Asian countries.
About Clay Tablet Technologies
Clay Tablet's unique translation integration software easily connects any number
of content management systems to any translation system or provider. Clients immediately
benefit from Clay Tablet 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.
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Asia Online Unveils Revolutionary Statistical Machine Translation Platform with
203 Language Pairs - Learns From Humans
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News Release
Wednesday, June 5, 2008 |
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Asia Online's new statistical machine translation platform
handles large-scale, bulk globalization projects in more than 203 language pairs,
and possesses the unique ability to learn from humans in real-time, giving it the
ability to constantly improve its translation quality and understand industry-specific
jargon and cultural nuances. The new platform will be available as an on-demand
service, greatly reducing the risk and complexity of deployment for language service
providers translating English, German, French, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Thai and
more.
Berlin / Bangkok - June 5, 2008 -- Asia Online today announced its statistical machine
translation (SMT) platform with support for 203 language pairs, making it the most
extensive translation system of its type in the world. Being unveiled during Localization
World in Berlin, the new platform has the unique ability to learn from humans in
real time.
Mr. Dion Wiggins, Asia Online CEO, says the new platform represents three major
improvements in machine translation. "Asia Online's Statistical Machine Translation
platform solves some of the key challenges of making machine translation work within
the context of real world, bulk translation projects."
Click to
enlarge
Thai - one of the most difficult natural language processing challenges
"The first challenge is access to technology in a managed and economical way. Asia
Online has solved this by making industrial-strength statistical machine translation
available as an on demand service. The second challenge has been the limited set
- and high cost - of available language pairs. We are launching with 203 language
pairs and will be adding more over the next year. Finally, previous machine translation
systems have suffered from quality issues and cumbersome approaches to training
the systems, resulting in systems that improve very slowly, if at all. We have solved
this by allowing our platform to learn from human proofreaders in real time."
The resulting platform is a combination of processes, technology and a new model
for working with large scale content publishers and language service providers with
customers who have large-scale, bulk translation requirements.
Industrial-strength Statistical Machine Translation Offered
as an On-Demand Service.
Asia Online is the first company to offer industrial-strength statistical machine
translation as an on- demand service.
Kirti Vashee, Vice President of Sales, Americas and Europe for Asia Online says,
"One of the big limitations for the adoption of statistical machine translation
has been the significant costs and risks associated with setting them up. We have
overcome that hurdle by making the Asia Online SMT platform available on-demand."
Mr. Vashee explains that the approach is similar to Software-as-a-Service solutions,
where all the technology is professionally run and managed behind the scenes. "Asia
Online's Statistical Machine Translation platform lets language service providers
focus on their core business, and dramatically improves their productivity by accessing
what is arguably the most powerful automated translation technology available today.
Furthermore, the tools and the processes needed to tailor the solution to specific
linguistic requirements and specific customers are also available."
The Asia Online statistical machine translation platform is far more than just a
translation engine. It is an entire suite of linguistic tools that provide very
advanced features for managing and processing corpus. Tools include code page conversion,
language model generation, translation job queue management and much more.
"Users will have full control of the environment to train and customize the Asia
Online platform with their own data. They can even integrate the Asia Online translation
platform into their own processes and information systems… all without having to
worry about the underlying technology," said Mr. Vashee.
Key industry technical standards are also support such as TMX and XLIFF, allowing
for seamless integration with existing translation products used by the language
service industry. Asia Online is engaging a number integration partners to produce
a set of adaptors that link directly into existing tools in an effort to allow partners
to get a maximum return on their existing translation technology investments while
using Asia Online's offerings.
203 Language Pairs and Counting
At launch Asia Online's statistical machine translation platform will support 203
language pairs, including a broad mix of European and Asian language pairs such
as: German-French, German-Spanish , German Portuguese, English-Hindi, English-Spanish,
English-Thai, English-Chinese etc.
The full set of languages include pairs from Arabic, Chinese, Bulgarian, Czech,
Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian,
Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak,
Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Thai.
In addition, Asia Online plans to have 470 language pairs available by year end
2008, prioritized in the order of customer demand.
According to Philipp Koehn, Asia Online's Chief Scientist, the rapid expansion of
the platform's capabilities is due to its unique design approach: "Asia Online's
Statistical Machine Translation platform was developed to handle the toughest challenges,
such as translating tens of millions of pages of European languages to Asian languages
like Thai, which is arguably one of the hardest languages for natural language processing.
Our platform excels with these sorts of challenges due to a range of proprietary
processes and techniques that we have engineered deep into the platform."
"By starting with the most difficult language pairs, we have been able to create
a statistical machine translation platform with proven capabilities. With this as
our base and with our efficient language training processes, it has been relatively
easy to extend the platform to handle many different languages pairs."
Currently, no other machine translation vendor offers a solution with the capacity
for 200+ language pairs. In addition, Mr. Kirti Vashee, the company's Vice President
of Sales, Americas and Europe, says that language service providers will not have
to pay upfront fees for each language pair, but will be able to access the languages
as they need.
A Translation Platform that Learns From Humans
Asia Online's statistical machine translation platform has the unique ability to
learn in real time and never make the same mistake twice.
Mr. Dion Wiggins, CEO of Asia Online, says, "Asia Online's Statistical Machine Translation
platform combines statistical machine translation with an environment for collaborative
and continuous improvement. Put simply, this means that the machine constantly learns
from humans and continuously improves."
"Part of the translation process is to have human subject matter experts proofread
early translations and make corrections as needed. Our platform assists with this
proofreading task and then makes a comprehensive analysis of the corrections, from
which the platform learns. The result is that the platform will never make the same
mistake twice and all subsequent translations are higher quality. We are not just
talking about words here… this approach lets the system learn idioms, cultural nuances
and industry jargon."
"From our own experience with our Thai Internet Portal project involving millions
of page translations, we know the Asia Online statistical machine translation platform
learns quickly, even with very difficult languages," says Mr. Wiggins.
Asia Online has already secured several significant language service provider partnerships
for its statistical machine translation platform, including McElroy in the USA,
Braahmam in India, and Andovar in Singapore.
The company will attend Localization World and will offer selected language service
providers and their clients with large-scale, bulk translation requirements a preview
of the platform's capabilities with over 200 language pairs. To arrange a demonstration,
please contact Kirti Vashee (see contacts.)
About Asia Online Pte Ltd
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 is to deliver 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 2007, Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by a number of individual
investors and institutional venture capital. Its corporate headquarters are in Singapore,
and its operational headquarters are in Bangkok, Thailand, where it conducts R&D
and daily business operations. Asia Online currently employs more than 180 staff
and is in the process of being incorporated in an additional 10 Asian countries.
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EXECUTIVES |
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Making industrial-strength machine translation with 200+ language
pairs available as an on-demand service.
Kirti Vashee, Vice President of Sales, Americas and Europe for Asia Online
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Solving the biggest challenges of large-scale, bulk translation
projects.
Dion Wiggins, CEO, Asia Online
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Asia Online and Andovar collaborate on IT, Technical and Educational content globalization
services
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News Release
Friday, May 30, 2008 |
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New statistical machine translation platform integrates with
managed globalization solution to provide large-scale, bulk translations of technical
documentation.
Bangkok May 30, 2008 -- Andovar, the consultative localization company with operations
in Boston, Singapore, and Bangkok, is partnering with automated translation technology
expert Asia Online to collaborate on new technologies that increase productivity
on highly technical translation projects.
The partnership combines Asia Online’s statistical machine translation (SMT) platform
and interactive continuous improvement environment with Andovar’s proven globalization
project management skills and services.
The Asia Online directly addresses this issue by combining a statistical machine
translation platform with an environment for collaborative and continuous improvement.
Andovar’s human subject-matter experts review the platform’s early translations
and make corrections as needed. A comprehensive analysis of the corrections is performed
in real time, from which the platform learns. The result is that the platform will
never make the same mistake twice and subsequent translations are improved.
According to Kirti Vashee, Vice President of Sales, Americas and Europe for Asia
Online, the machine-human feedback loop is vital to the success of the project.
“Andovar manages very large scale, complex content on behalf of its customers. In
many cases, the content contains technical jargon, marketing buzzwords, and even
internal codes and references. Streamlining the process of proofreading is therefore
vital in reducing overall costs,” said Mr Vashee. “The initial training processes
coupled with the subject-matter expert feedback loop allows Andovar to focus on
managing their customers’ projects, while not having to worry about the technicalities
of feeding a computer training data periodically. More importantly, this approach
gives higher quality translations at a faster rate than alternative solutions.”
Mr Vashee sees the agreement with Andovar as evidence of a shift in the way vendors
of statistical machine translation technology work with language service providers:
“Our relationship with Andovar is collaborative. Asia Online is providing the underlying
machine translation tools, while Andovar is providing the subject-matter experts
and linguists needed to ensure ongoing continued improvements in the scope of vocabulary
and quality of translation. It’s a win-win situation.”
About Asia Online Pte Ltd
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 is to deliver 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 2007, Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by a number of individual
investors and institutional venture capital. Its corporate headquarters are in Singapore,
and its operational headquarters are in Bangkok, Thailand, where it conducts R&D
and daily business operations. Asia Online currently employs more than 180 staff
and is in the process of being incorporated in an additional 10 Asian countries.
About Andovar Pte Ltd (www.andovar.com)
Andovar delivers multilingual localization solutions that encompass the full range
of today's modern media, whether audio, video, software or websites. It manages
the end-to-end process of simultaneously shipping products into multiple languages
and assists organizations in building sustainable, scalable and repeatable processes.
Currently is focused on serving the software industry, as well as leading players
in multimedia, mobile devices and eLearning.
By separating production and client-side activities in those locales best placed
to carry out those very different functions, Andovar leverages low offshore labor
costs married with skilled consultants working close to client's regional and global
headquarters.
Established in 2007 by industry veterans who saw the potential of offering a new
kind of localization infrastructure, Andovar is headquartered in Singapore with
production carried out in Thailand where it has fully equipped studios for audio
and video production. Its Boston office provides the interface for US clients allowing
seamless communication across time zones. Additional offices are planned for Europe
and South America in the coming year.
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Asia Online and Braahmam Join Forces to Streamline Indian Translation
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News Release
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 |
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New machine translation platform to ‘learn’ cultural nuances
in real time and increase throughput for large-scale, bulk translation projects.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (29 April 2008)— Braahmam, a leader in localized digital content
creation based in National Capital Region of Delhi, India, is partnering with automated
translation technology expert Asia Online to collaborate on new technologies that
will dramatically speed up the translation and creation of localized digital content
for e-learning, training, publishing and corporate web sites.
The partnership combines Asia Online’s statistical machine translation platform
and interactive continual improvement environment with Braahmam’s deep expertise
in translations of educational and corporate content within India.
“The Indian and international market for localization of digital media is growing
exponentially,” said Biraj Rath, Director Business Development of Braahmam. “A fundamental
tenet of our business is to locate and use the very best technology not only to
speed up production and reduce costs of content delivery, but also to improve our
quality of service. It is essential to leverage innovative technology to stay ahead
in what is becoming an increasingly competitive market.”
The Asia Online solution that Braahmam is adopting is indeed innovative. It combines
a statistical machine translation platform with an environment for collaborative
and continual improvement. Human subject-matter experts review the early translations
and make corrections as needed. A comprehensive analysis of the corrections is performed
in real time, from which the system learns. The result is that the system will never
make the same mistake twice and subsequent translations are improved.
According to Kirti Vashee, Vice President of Sales, Americas and Europe for Asia
Online, the machine-human feedback loop is vital to the success of the project:
“Braahmam’s clients are varied and the multimedia educational and training content
they work with often contains unique phrases and idioms, some of which have a distinct
cultural orientation. While machine translation can learn how to handle these rich
idioms, it still takes an experienced human to help the machine get it right the
first time round. As the machine learns from the human feedback, it becomes more
adept… more culturally nuanced.”
Mr Vashee sees the agreement with Braahmam as evidence of a shift in the way translation
technology providers work with translation companies: “Our relationship with Braahmam
is collaborative. Asia Online is providing the underlying tools, while Braahmam
is providing the subject-matter experts and linguists needed to ensure ongoing continued
improvements in the scope of vocabulary and quality of translation. It’s a win-win
situation.”
About Asia Online Pte Ltd (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 is to deliver 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 delivers machine translation
quality that is 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 corporate headquarters are in Singapore,
and its operational headquarters are in Bangkok, Thailand, where it conducts R&D
and daily business operations. Asia Online currently employs more than 180 staff
and is in the process of being incorporated in an additional 10 Asian countries.
About Braahmam Net Solutions (www.braahmam.net) Braahmam Net Solutions Pvt. Ltd is a company
driven by excellence in the areas of Content creation, Content presentation, and
Content deployment. Four enterprising professionals formed the company in June 2000.
Since its inception, Braahmam is catering to different segments of the market with
its e-Learning, Multimedia, and Localization services.
In this short period, Braahmam has served customers in Europe, US, and Far East
Asia providing services ranging from simple editing and testing services to development
of Web based Training packed with complex high-end animation. In addition, Braahmam
has delivered localization projects in diverse international languages, such as
German, Russian, Thai, and various Indian languages, such as Hindi, Urdu, Marathi,
Gujarati, Oriya, Punjabi, Bengali, and Tamil.
Braahmam proudly provides the best services at a fraction of the cost. Braahmam’s
innovative work and adherence to quality has been commended by the Brandon Hall
survey of "Custom Content e-Learning Providers" in 2004.
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Asia Online and McElroy Translation Join Forces for High Volume Translations
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News Release
Wednesday, May 21, 2008 |
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Automated translation technology start up and veteran translation
company poised to lead industry in MT/HT collaboration
Austin, TX (19 May 2008)—McElroy Translation, a full-service language services provider
based in Austin, is partnering with automated translation technology expert Asia
Online to collaborate on new technologies based on the symbiotic relationship between
machine translation and human translation (MT/HT). The partnership combines Asia
Online’s statistical machine translation platform and interactive continuous improvement
environment with McElroy Translation’s deep linguistic expertise in technical and
patent translations.
This technology and services collaboration by the companies will break new ground
in the translation market by dramatically cutting delivery times and costs while
maintaining top quality on high-volume, large-scale translation projects (those
with hundreds of millions of words).
Kirti Vashee, Vice President of Sales, Americas and Europe for Asia Online explains:
“Asia Online’s statistical machine translation platform is an environment for collaborative
and continuous improvement. Human subject-matter experts review the early translations
and make any necessary corrections to perfect the text. A comprehensive analysis
of the corrections is performed in real time, from which the system learns so that
not only will it never make the same mistake twice, but also all subsequent translations
are improved. Our unique collaborative relationship with McElroy provides the subject-matter
experts and linguists needed to ensure the continued improvements in the scope of
vocabulary and quality of translation.”
Massive translation projects, which often are in the technical or intellectual property
fields and frequently involve English and Asian languages, have been prohibitive
to date because of the cost and time required. However, by matching statistical
machine translation and interactive continuous improvement to an expert linguist
who has subject matter expertise, the jobs can be accomplished quickly at a high
level of quality.
“There is a large body of content out there that hasn’t really been touched outside
of the native language because of translation limitations,” said Bob Donaldson,
VP of Strategy for McElroy Translations. “One way to change that is to use statistical
machine translation that is then polished by a human translator. McElroy is combining
its forty years of experience in intellectual property and technical translation
with Asia Online’s dynamic technology to create a major shift in the translation
industry.”
About McElroy Translation (www.mcelroytranslation.com)
McElroy Translation places 40 years of experience, extensive linguistic resources,
and advanced business processes to work for every client. From its home-base in
Austin, Texas, McElroy offers translation and localization services in more than
100 languages to clients worldwide. The company specializes in the legal, pharmaceutical/medical,
energy and software industries. McElroy prides itself in quality assurance and professional
project management support.
About Asia Online Pte Ltd (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 is to deliver 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 2007, 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, where it conducts R&D and daily business
operations. Asia Online currently employs more than 180 staff and is in the process
of being incorporated in an additional 10 Asian countries.
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Asia Online Speaks The Right Language To Attract Japanese Investment
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News Release
Monday, April 14, 2008 |
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Leading Japanese Venture Capital Company Japan Asia Investment
Company (JAIC) named Asia Online's first institutional investor
Bangkok, Thailand: Monday 14 April, 2008 - Asia Online, an emerging Asian portal
and automated translation company, today announced that leading Japanese Venture
Capital company, Japan Asia Investment Company Ltd. (JAIC), has become the company's
first institutional investor.
JAIC'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 non-English speaking Asia.
"Today, Asia accounts for more than 38% of all Internet users and by 2012 is expected
to account for almost 50%. Yet despite this vast pool of users, more than 86% of
all content on the Internet today is in non-Asian languages," said Dion Wiggins,
CEO of Asia Online. "Of the 14% representing Asian content, most is Chinese, Japanese
and Korean. All other Asian language content combined accounts for less than 0.03%
of all content online."
Asia Online's unique services will enable people to transcend language as a barrier
to knowledge by providing unrivalled access to hundreds of millions of pages of
information and knowledge – in their language of choice.
"Asia Online is revolutionizing access to web content by taking language out of
the equation," said Osamu Hosokubo, Director of JAIC. "Asia is the fastest growing
market for Internet users and online advertising is the fastest growing industry
in the world whilst the costs of IT resources and internet access are declining
relative to other business operations. JAIC is pleased to invest in Asia Online.
We believe the company is well positioned to take advantage of all these factors
via its unique content delivery model and technology platform."
Wiggins added that he expected JAIC's unrivalled relationships would help accelerate
and expand Asia Online's customer base in Japan and Asia: "We are delighted to get
such strong support from such a well renowned financial institution and are looking
forward to integrating with and adding value to JAIC's other portfolio of companies
via our unique translation platforms." said Wiggins.
About Asia Online PTE Ltd.
(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 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 150 staff and is in
the process of being incorporated in an additional 10 Asian countries.
About Japan Asia Investment Company Ltd. (JAIC)
(http://www.jaic-vc.co.jp)
JAIC was established in 1981 by the Japan Association of Corporate Executives (Keizai
Doyukai) as an independent venture capital company and now ranks as one of Japan's
largest venture capital companies. In addition to its headquarters in Tokyo and
an office in the United States, JAIC has six branch offices in Japan as well as
a network of overseas subsidiaries in key Asia-Pacific locations.
JAIC manages a total of 65 funds with an aggregate fund size of 151,360 million
yen (US$1.3bn). JAIC is currently listed on the JASDAQ stock exchange. JAIC has
built its business around three geographic hubs in Japan, other parts in Asia (10
countries) and the United States. With a multi-disciplinary team of over 100 investment
professionals, JAIC is able to provide integrated financial services to companies
in various sectors and at various stages of development.
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Asia Online Appoints Kirti Vashee VP of Sales for America's and Europe
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News Release
Tuesday, April 1, 2008 |
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Seasoned IT executive and automated translation technology
visionary Kirti Vashee joins Asia Online.
Industry veteran and statistical machine translation evangelist
to spearhead international sales.
Seasoned IT sales and marketing executive and SMT (statistical machine translation)
evangelist, Kirti Vashee, has joined automated translation technology expert, Asia
Online, as Vice President of Sales for the Americas and Europe.
An industry veteran, Vashee joins Asia Online from SMT pioneer, Language Weaver
where, as Vice President of Sales and Marketing, he was responsible for the company’s
worldwide business development strategy.
Vashee brings extensive enterprise software and information services industries
experience to the company, having held senior sales and product marketing positions
in both small entrepreneurial start-ups that were successfully sold to much larger
public companies, as well as large blue chip organizations, including EMC and Dow
Jones.
Rapid economic growth in Asia, and globalization trends in general, have led to
significant demand by the world's largest companies to bring content, product, and
services to Asian markets. Asia Online is focused on building best-of-breed translation
systems that pair 11 Asian languages with the most widely spoken European languages,
not just to English. Additionally, the next billion Internet users are also largely
expected to be Asian, offering lucrative new markets to Global 2000 companies who
reach out to this new user base. In addition, Asia Online plans to expand its core
Asian language portfolio to include direct translation to/from many key European
languages throughout this year.
By 2012, Asia is expected to account for almost 50% of all Internet users. Asia
Online aims to have more than 48 million new users throughout Asia, who will be
regularly using the Internet in their own languages, for everything from email,
to in-depth research and educationally-focused content.
“It is extremely gratifying that our vision has caught the attention of such a key
industry player. This is a key appointment that will significantly boost our global
sales and marketing push at a pivotal point in our growth,” said Dion Wiggins, Chief
Executive Officer of Asia Online. “Kirti has built an enviable reputation as a thought
leader and visionary in large-scale corporate translation and its role in furthering
international trade and communication. His in-depth understanding of the knowledge
management and translation industries, coupled with his expertise in building worldwide
partnerships, will unquestionably help us to strengthen and build our partner and
customer network.
Vashee has established successful sales operations for several companies in Europe
and the Asia Pacific region, and has extensive experience developing motivated and
effective distribution channels and partner networks. He joined Language Weaver
in 2005 from EMC where, most recently, he was Vice President, Xtender Solutions.
He became part of EMC’s organization when it acquired Smart Storage (Legato), a
company that he was instrumental in building from a five-person start-up to a successful,
globally recognized 125 person organization.
Vashee is a sought-after and accomplished speaker on automated translation technology
at localization and globalization technology focused conferences around the world.
“Asia Online has a tremendously compelling – even world-changing vision. I am excited
to be part of a company whose unique services will enable people to transcend language
as a barrier to knowledge,” said Vashee. “Today, more than 86% of all content on
the Internet is in non-Asian languages. The remaining 14% is mostly Chinese, Japanese
and Korean, with all other Asian language combined accounting for less than 0.03%
of all content online. Asia Online will make a massive amount of new content available
in these under-served languages and quite possibly change the translation landscape
in doing so.”
“Asia Online offers a technology infrastructure that I believe is truly revolutionary
and provides significant productivity increases to its emerging corporate customer
base as this architecture allows their systems to improve with each use and ongoing
corrective feedback. This continuous feedback loop will drive constant quality improvements,
which will encourage and enable massive translation projects that would never otherwise
be undertaken.”
Vashee did his undergraduate work in economics and finance at Bombay University,
India, and received his MBA from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. He is
an active member of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs Association www.tie.org).
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 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 150 staff and is in
the process of being incorporated in an additional 10 Asian countries.
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Startup Aims to Rapidly Increase Local Content
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Database Section
Wednesday, November 21, 2007 |
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Asia Online set to take Thai language test
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
Ending months of speculation and secretive development, former Gartner vice president
Dion Wiggins has formally unveiled Asia Online, his latest venture into statistical
machine translation (SMT) aimed at bringing the world's content to non-English language
speakers in Asia. And he said he is willing to prove the quality of his system by
offering it free for a major textbook translation project recently announced by
the ICT Ministry.
Speaking at the ICT Forum, Wiggins praised initiatives such as Negroponte's "one
hundred dollar" laptop, Windows XP Starter Edition and Microsoft's Flexgo micropayment
programme for increasing awareness of ICT but warned that this hardware-led view
has seen a shortage of content.
"People talk about the digital divide. They forget the content issue. If you don't
have content then why would you go online?" he asked.
Wiggins claimed that even popular sites such as sanook.com have failed to make the
move into large sale content as it is not a cheap thing to do.
There are less than 10 million web pages in Thailand, a country of 65 million people.
However, Indonesia has less than 500,000 web pages and has 15 times the population
of Thailand, which suggests that most Indonesians use English on the web.
Wiggins said that the next billion Internet users will mostly come from non-English
speakers in emerging markets. The key to tapping into this market is, he believes,
machine translation.
There are two ways to do machine translation. Rule-based translation uses linguists
to come up with rules, but the problem is then that every other sentence is an exception
that breaks the rules.
Statistical Machine Translation is a method that takes two parallel texts, compares
them, and builds up a probability ratio of how likely each word or phrase is to
be translated into another word or phrase. Thus it can learn any pair of languages
if fed enough "parallel copra" or pairs of texts, such as a copy of Harry Potter
in English and another one in Thai.
Wiggins said that a professional translator can charge more than US$100,000 a year
and can translate only 1,500 words a day. However, one PC running Asia Online's
SMT software can translate seven million words a day today and he expects to take
that up to 20 million words a day with further development.
When told that the ICT Ministry had just commenced a 100 million baht book translation
project to expand the knowledge available in Thai, Wiggins immediately offered his
system for the initial translation free of charge, and added that while a typical
book translation can take up to three months, his SMT system can do it in 15 minutes.
By the end of the [next] year, Asia Online expects to have 440 Asian language pairs
available. This also allows for direct translation from, say, Thai to Japanese without
having to go through English first and will even translate between little used languages
like Khmer.
Wiggins noted that Thai did pose a number of unique challenges, as it is one of
the few languages without punctuation and word breaks. Asia Online had to develop
software to correctly break up words and sentences. Asia Online also had to develop
its own optical character recognition algorithm as none of the commercially available
systems were good enough to accurately scan the huge amounts of text needed to learn
the language.
"Automatic translation will dramatically improve citizen's knowledge, education
and the overall economy. Thailand's R&D as a percentage of GDP is one of the
lowest and the number of engineers and scientists per million citizens is also one
of the lowest. Access to knowledge is the way to change that," he said.
Another promising avenue that Asia Online is considering is voice to voice translation.
It has developed a system that converts voice to text, translates that text to another
language with the standard SMT software, and then reconverts that translated text
to voice.
Republished with the kind permission of Bangkok Post
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A Short History of Asia Online
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In mid 2006, ex-Gartner analyst Bob Hayward starts researching opportunities for
new Internet business models in South East Asia based in Bangkok, Thailand. In collaboration
with Gartner analyst Dion Wiggins and locally-based IT/IP legal expert Gregory Binger,
a business model based around the exploitation of newly emerging automated machine
translation technology takes shape.
In late 2006, Dion Wiggins joins Bob in Bangkok working full time on the venture
along with Gregory Binger and a thorough analysis of the leaders in global machine
translation identifies Dr. Philipp Koehn from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland
as a respected expert in this field. Dr. Koehn visits Bangkok and the four founding
members join together to launch the venture and start work on the basic technologies
that underpin Asia Online.
In January 2007, Asia Online gradually starts to bring on board its core team and
during the following months achieves a number of world-first technical innovations,
while remaining in stealth mode.
In July, 2007, Asia Online outgrows its initial office facility and moves into a
large converted house on Bangkok’s Sukhumvit Soi 41.
In September 2007 Asia Online develops the SOCRO solution that delivers extremely
high quality text output from scanned documents in any language and any font. This
is key for many Asian languages today that have very poor OCR capability when compared
to European languages.
In mid-November 2007, as work proceeds to build the most accurate machine translation
technology between Asian and European languages, Asia Online receives a significant
injection of working capital from a number of individual investors.
On November 17th, 2007, Asia Online emerges from stealth mode as CEO Dion Wiggins
makes a presentation at the ICT Forum event held at the Impact arena in Bangkok,
Thailand where Asia Online is publicly revealed for the first time. This is followed
shortly afterwards by the launch of the Asia Online corporate website.
On March 12, 2008, Asia Online CEO Dion Wiggins presented at the LISA (www.lisa.org)
conference in Beijing. This was the companies first public presentation to the linguistic
community and was received well by the audience with a considerable amount of follow
up discussions with many conference attendees. The presentation can be downloaded
from here .
On March 13, the Translation Automation User Society (TAUS) featured Asia Online
as part of its cover page. The article can be seen here.
On April 1, 2008, seasoned IT executive and automated translation technology visionary
Kirti Vashee joined the Asia Online team as Vice President of Sales for the Americas
and Europe. Formerly working for SMT pioneer Language Weaver, Kirti brings extensive
enterprise software and information services industries experience to the company.
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Talking In Tongues
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Database Section
Wednesday, September 19, 2007 |
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A Thailand-based web company wants to create the ultimate translation
tool
Story by DON SAMBANDARAKSA
A web company based in Thailand is hoping to create a tool that allows for the translation
of Asian language texts, including Thai, into any other major language and vice
versa. In doing so, it hopes to make the vast amount of information on the Internet
available to those who cannot read English.
One year ago, Asia Online invited Professor Philipp Koehn from the University of
Edinburgh's School of Informatics to help perfect Statistical Machine Translation
(SMT) for Thai and many other Asian languages. In an exclusive interview, Koehn
explained how SMT first arose as an IBM project in the late 1980s, translating between
French and English.
Instead of the usual rules and grammatical structure, SMT uses statistics through
paring up sentences in each language, called parallel copra, and learning how sentences
are translated. Essentially, the system can learn Thai by feeding it, for example,
copies of Harry Potter in English and the translated Thai versions for it to analyse.
The system works much better than conventional rule-based systems as few languages
have words that map directly to another. "Take the phrase 'interest rate.' Interest
has a lot of different meanings, rate is also an amorphous word that has many meanings,
but interest rate together has a very definite translation. Local context helps
a lot," Koehn explained. Another example is refuse (the verb, meaning turn down)
and refuse (the noun, meaning trash). These give surprisingly few problems.
The challenges lie with different sentence structures. Japanese and German, for
instance, have the verb at the end of the sentence. German also has morphology,
where words merge into huge monster words. A bigger problem is with languages that
leave out information altogether, for instance on tense or omitted subjects or objects
which have to then be gathered from the surrounding sentences.
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Professor Philipp Koehn of the University of Edinburgh
shows of the EuroMatrix, a statistical machine translation (SMT) project used to
translate to and from each of the European Union's languages. Today he is helping
perfect Thai SMT with Asia Online. — DON SAMBANDARAKSA |
Away from his work at Asia Online and the university, Koehn is also working on real-time
voice translation for DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for
Chinese and Arabic. The system is already deployed in Iraq and has by far the most
mature SMT engine available, with over 200 million parallel copra sentence pairs.
The system starts to work well with 20 million sentence pairs and gives a good result
with 40 million, according to Koehn.
Another project is in the European Union. Its 25 official languages means over 600
language pairs that every document needs to be translated to and from. One benefit
is the high quality of existing legal documents which can be used to train the SMT
engine.
For Thai, one of the unique challenges has been to create a work segmentation pre-processor,
as Thai does not have breaks between words or full stops. Today, Asia Online has
hired fresh graduates from Chulalongkorn University's computational linguistics
programme and is working with researchers from Chulalongkorn, Thammasat, Kasetsart
and NECTEC (the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre).
It also has developed a post-processor that rates the quality of Thai and the automatic
changes are fed back into the SMT learning engine.
The algorithms are relatively advanced. Learning Arabic with 200 million parallel
copra takes around a week on a modern Linux PC with 4GB of memory and a lot of hard
disk space.
Asia Online founder Dion Wiggins explained that while Professor Koehn has been focusing
on the usability and the translation quality as part of his pure research work,
it will be up to Asia Online to architect the algorithms in a way that can scale
to thousands of transactions a second. This will allow users of the Asia Online
portal to view the I | | |