Asia Online's Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) platform is engineered to handle large-scale, bulk translation projects involving millions of pages of text, as well as supporting small real-time translation needs, that break down barriers between people and nations.

What makes Asia Online's translation platform unique is that it continues to evolve and learn through an ongoing Human Feedback Loop . This ensures that translation quality constantly improves. When translation errors are corrected, the platform learns from the correction and never makes the same mistake again.

Asia Online has developed an entire translation platform that is leading the way in machine translation advances. Asia Online is not just a developer of machine translation technologies, through our Asian Language Portals , we are one of the world’s largest users of machine translation. This enables us to fully understand the challenges of real world use better. We are constantly looking for issues in scalability, quality and performance and addressing them so that we constantly improve our platform and the quality of our raw output. Without being a user of our own technology, we would have to wait for customer feedback. By being a power user ourselves, we are the first to find and then quickly solve the most challenging translation and quality issues.

Asia Online has developed many tools for its internal use in preparing and processing linguistic data. As these tools evolve and mature, we are rapidly making them available to our customers. Some tools can be downloaded from our Tools and Software Downloads  page, while others are part of the Enterprise Translation Portal .

Some tools are very complex and need to be tuned to each unique set of data to work best – for these specialized tools Asia Online offers access to this functionality as a service. Our staff will process your data  in the most efficient and optimized manner, customizing the parameters to your data and returning high quality output. An example of this is Asia Online's data cleaning, data alignment and data conversion services which converts data from translation memory formats optimized for Translation Memory tools to formats suitable for the Statistical Machine Translation services described below.

Not all data is good data for SMT. In many cases small amounts of data that is cleaner  can produce far better quality translation output than larger amounts of dirty  data. Contact Asia Online now for a FREE data quality and SMT data suitability assessment   Our professional linguists will analyze your data and explain what work is required to make it suitable for use as training material to produce a high quality SMT engine.

Asia Online understands that machine translation needs to be used in different ways and have packaged our offerings in a number of forms so that you can decide on a solution that best suits your business needs:

	Enterprise Translation Portal More  Asia Online hosts the entire translation environment for your on-demand use. No servers, software or hardware are required, just your web browser. Features include translation, post editing tools, quality assesment, format conversion and many other data processing tools.
	Application Programmer Interface (API) More  Connect to the Asia Online platform via industry standard Web Services and access most of the key translation and linguistic functions of the Enterprise Translation Portal from within your applications. APIs are available that connect to the Enterprise Translation Portal or your own On-Site Server Installation.
	On-Site Server Installation More  For mass translation, real-time translation or translation within a secure environment, Asia Online offers on-site server licenses where you provide the hardware and manage your own translation environment. Backed by Asia Online's support team, your own enviroment can be scaled out to meet your ongoing business growth requirements.

Our pricing is flexible based on your business needs. Contact Asia Online sales team for more information. More 

	Charge By Quantity More  We offer flexible pricing broken down by pages (units of 25 translation segments or sentences.) All language pairs are available and can be mixed and matched to give the most flexibility without paying more. Pricing is offered at different rates based on 1 page, 100 pages, 1,000 pages and 10,000 pages. Special custom pricing is also available if these standard offerings do not meet your needs.
	Charge By Time Period More  For companies with higher volumes of translation in specific language pairs, Asia Online offers bulk access pricing by the month or by the year for each language pair.
	Charge By Server License More  Asia Online offers two types of server licence pricing packages. If you require dedicated servers due to high translation volume, then Asia Online can host and manage a dedicated server for you in our world class data center. If you wish to manage your own server on-site in your company, then Asia Online offers attractive pricing for your onsite server needs.

Asia Online is constantly developing new language pairs. Ask your Asia Online sales representative for more information on the languages that interest you.

If you don't see the languages that you are interested in on the list below, talk to us about building a custom solution and our language development schedule 

Currently Asia Online supports 512 language pairs, with an additional 232 language pairs under development. Our language pairs are always expanding, with new language pairs being constantly added.

See our full list of Language pairs currently available and language pairs under development.

A variety of language pairs are available using combinations of the above languages. Most European languages can be translated into any other Eurpean language. Asian languages are limited to languages pairs from and to English at this time, but we are working to support language pairs in all directions and all supported languages in the future.

We provide a full list of language abbreviations  for reference. Asia Online constantly evolves its Baseline  engines, improving their quality and vocabulary range. These engines are used to build a foundation translation engine that can be leveraged as the basis for a customized translation engine.

The table below provides a sample of BLEU Scores  for key European language pairs. The baseline BLEU scores were measured in February, 2009 and constantly evolve. Contact Asia Online for the best baseline appropriate for your language pair and domain.

Note: The above scores are based on general translations. Scores in specific domains of knowledge will vary depending on vocabulary coverage and other content within the training data.

The measure your own BLEU scores, Asia Online provides the Translation Quality Evaluation  tool for free download. Currently the tool supports the BLEU and F-Measure metrics and the other metrics will be added in the near future.

Speed is sometimes important, but there are other factors to consider when looking at speed. If a computer translates at 50,000 words per minute, but the quality of the output requires extensive human editing, then nearly all the initial speed gains are lost in the human post editing process. Sometimes it can even cost more to use low quality machine translation than to do a job entirely by human effort.

To help understand the costs and savings possible with machine translation Asia Online has developed a specialized Translation Analysis and Error Correction Cost Calculator .

Customized translation engines that are focused on your domain of knowledge will always give the highest quality results.

Measuring quality is not easy. Quality is often subjective. One person's opinion of quality is not the same as another's. While you can rate quality using humans, this is again a subjective process. The Asia Online Translation Analysis and Error Correction Cost Calculator  can be used to determine some key quality metrics using human assessments. But when measuring output quality on MT systems in development, one often needs to make frequent measurements and a human assessment process can be slow and expensive.

There are a number of automated industry measures to facilitate this, the most common being BLEU. Others such as F-Measure, NIST, METEOR and TER are also available. The Asia Online Translation Quality Evaluation  tool currently supports the BLEU and F-Measure metrics and the other metrics will be added in the near future.

Asia Online has created an article that explains translation quality metrics  and how to best use and interpret the measurements they make.

So now that you understand how to measure quality, that just leaves one important question to resolve....

How do you build a high quality customized translation engine?

There are several factors that contribute to a high quality custom engine. You may need different engines or domains built for different purposes. An engine that was built for high quality translation of financial reports would probably do a terrible job of translating content on healthcare, medicine or an article on the English Premier League football. For this reason we create high quality customized translation engines in key domains that are focused on a specific subject matter or areas of knowledge.

NOTE: This section uses a number of terms that have specific definitions. The Common Definitions of Terms Used by Asia Online  page provides additional clarity.

Quality does not mean perfect. Typically, system output begins at a “good enough” quality for accurate comprehension, and then evolves to higher levels of quality over a period of time. Asia Online has built a series of tools and processes that enable the rapid creation of a custom engine, and then facilitates the ongoing refinement, fine tuning and evolution of that engine, until it reaches a level that is able to greatly reduce the time, cost and effort of producing ongoing translations.

There are three key stages to building a high quality custom translation engine.

Cycling through these three stages delivers significant increases in productivity, and ensures that the human feedback and corrections are applied as knowledge driving continued improvements in the translation engine.

Overview of the Asia Online Custom Translation Engine Build Process 

Once an engine has been built and fine tuned, translations can be performed using the Enterprise Translation Portal  and posted edited to correct any translation errors. The post editing environmentprovided by the Enterprise Translation Portal allows for the corrections to be submitted back to Asia Online, but also allows language professionals to see the data that was used to make the translation decisions that determined the final translation output.

As Asia Online uses clean data  as its foundation, the typical cause for translation issues is insufficient data. By understanding what data was used to deliver a translated phrase, as few as 5-10 sentences can be added to the systems training data to solve common translation issues.