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.

Don't forget to register for the latest Asia Online webinar.

- Team Asia Online

High-quality automated machine translation is an attainable goal. Professional machine translation and professional human translation are very similar. In order to deliver high quality translations to your clients, specialist translators are required who have a deep understanding of the client's target domain, writing style and audience.

Unlike other machine translation technologies that offer only “gist” quality translations, Language Studio™ is designed for producing translations for publishers – this not only means that quality expectations are higher, but also that there is an high degree of control that can be maintained over the entire translation process.

Because Asia Online is also a multilingual content publisher, Language Studio™ has been designed for publishing translated content from the outset. We have experienced the same pain points that other publishers have and worked hard to remove them. Language Studio™ supports features such as non-translatable terms, glossaries, customizable capitalization, post translation adjustments to the output text and the ability to be tailored to a client’s specific writing style and target audience. You can even use the same translation engine for different clients and adapt at runtime to client specific vocabulary and terminology.

Asia Online has developed the world’s first automated technology designed to translate content to a near-human publication quality in more than 500 language pair combinations. Other legacy translation technologies merely seek to provide a general understanding (gist) of the content that is translated, but they do not achieve either a publication level process or the translation quality required for publication.

An out-of-the-box solution will always fall short of quality goals. In order to deliver high quality, a machine translation system must be customized to a specific purpose.

Translation has a lot in common with the authoring of articles for a publication where the audience, preferred vocabulary and writing style are defined. Specialists are required in order to deliver high quality articles and translators working in their mother tongue will translate such articles better than someone working in a second or third language. The same logic applies to machine translation which can be customized and specialized for a purpose. It is essential that target audience, vocabulary and writing style are taken into account. This is where out-of-the-box translation solutions fail. Only where there is specialization can high quality be achieved. Language Studio™ has three customization options that provide immediate, rapid or deep customization capabilities.

The program for the 16th Annual LRC Internationalisation & Localisation Conference  in Limerick, Ireland is packed with interesting and informative presentations. Asia Online’s CEO, Dion Wiggins will be presenting “Business Strategies for Building Strategic Advantage and Revenue Generation from Machine Translation” alongside Sajan’s  Director of Product Management, Steve Holmes. As part of this presentation, Steve will present a case study on Sajan’s MT customization experience with Asia Online.

Return On Investment (ROI) is not well understood for MT projects. Although it is well known that customization of MT delivers translations that contain fewer errors and therefore require less post editing, it is not well understood how quickly ROI can be achieved and what the costs of using MT are on an on-going basis.

Dion Wiggins will also be running a workshop “MT & ROI: Scoping, Defining and Selecting Suitable Projects” that will explore the costs and ROI for various MT projects and how quickly the costs of customization can be recovered and cost savings realized using real-world information provided by the workshop participants.

Not every project is suitable for machine translation, and we will explore the types of projects that are most suited and likely to succeed, and the related Business Models. The workshop will also explore the types of project that are suitable for machine Translation, and how they can be combined with human effort to deliver successful results in less time and with higher margins.

Talk to us about the expected ROI
for your projects.

Our experienced team will work with you to quickly determine the expected costs and time savings of a hybrid machine and human translation approach.

Asia Online has been fortunate to attract two world famous linguistic explorers to host the mailing list and share their thoughts and insights with us.

Dr. Goover is a renowned world explorer and Dr. Weagle is a former linguistic professor. Both graduated from Dunnowotusayin University in the outbacks of Australia. Both have now retired from the translation industry and are exploring the world in search of new linguistic knowledge and facts. Each month they will be discussing their latest exploits and globetrotting, and providing subscribers with industry insights from a linguistic perspective.

Did you know that Thailand has the world's longest place name?
A total of 157 letters make up the official name of the city more commonly known as Bangkok where Asia Online has its Regional Technology Development Center. The full name is: Krung-thep-maha-nakorn-boworn-ratana-kosin-mahintar-ayudhya-amaha-dilok-pop-nopa-ratana-rajthani-burirom-udom-rajniwes-mahasat-arn-amorn-pimarn-avatar-satit-sakattiya-visanukam-prasit.

Context is important. Machine translation can sometimes give interesting and commical translations. But even human translators can make embarrassing mistakes if context is not understood. Customized machine translation can be taught to better handle context to avoid situations like those below:

Reverse translation from Hebrew - "Lady Diana would diaper her young sons." The original English read "Lady Diana pampered her young sons." Pampers is a brand of diapers.

Reverse translation from French - "The fields of the bathroom." The original English had the persons name "W.C. Fields." W.C. was understood to be an abbreviation of "water closet" or bathroom.

Clean Data Machine Translation: Delivering near-human quality translations

Multiple presentations in US, Europe and Asia friendly times.

There are many approaches to Machine Translation (MT). Rules Based Machine Translation (RBMT) is rapidly being superseded by Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) approaches. However there are also several approaches to SMT.

Asia Online takes a unique “Clean Data” approach to SMT that focuses on the quality of data, not rather than the quantity of data. Using the Clean Data approach, it is possible to build a near-human quality customized translation engine. This presentation will explore the process of creating and improving near-human quality custom translation engines using Asia Online Language Studio’s clean data tools and processes.

Asia Online already supports more than 520 language pairs and has more than 200 additional language pairs under development. More Information

Language Studio™ Drop Folders

Language Studio™ Pro and Language Studio™ Pro (Lite Edition) have a Windows service that monitors specified folders for documents to translate.

Simply copy a document into the folder and it will be submitted automatically for translation and saved to another folder of your choice when translation is complete.