| Industry | Translation / Portals |
|---|---|
| Founder(s) | Gregory Binger, Dion Wiggins, Bob Hayward, Philipp Koehn |
| Headquarters | Singapore |
| Number of locations | Singapore, Thailand, Los Angeles, Indonesia |
| Key people | Gregory Binger, Dion Wiggins, Bob Hayward, Philipp Koehn, Tim Cox, Kirti Vashee. |
| Products | Language Studio Automated Translation Suite |
| Services | Automated translation |
| Website | http://www.asiaonline.com, http://www.asiaonline.net, http://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[1].
Asia Online is undertaking what it calls the world's largest literacy project[2] by translating vast quantities of the worlds English language knowledge into Asian languages. This is achieved using statistical machine translation (SMT) technologies developed and enhanced in Thailand with a specific focus on Asian languages. Despite the name, Asia Online is not limited to just Asian languages and also supports all 23 official EU languages across each other.[3].
It was founded in 2007 by the University of Edinburgh's Philipp Koehn, Gregory Binger a leading technologist and IT/IP lawyer, and former Gartner senior analysts Bob Hayward and Dion Wiggins.[4].
Asia Online’s statistically-based translation software is an instance of recent advances in automated translation. Until the early 1990s, almost all production-level machine translation technology relied on collections of linguistic rules to analyze the source sentence, and then map the syntactic and semantic structure into the target language. Asia Online uses statistical techniques from cryptography, applying machine learning algorithms that automatically acquire statistical models from existing parallel collections of human translations, in the same way as Google Translate and the systems made using Koehn's own open source Moses tool for SMT.
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On January 7, 2011, Asia Online launched it’s Thai language consumer portal[5]. The launch was funded in part by CAT Telecom and the Thai Ministry of ICT. All 3.6 million English language Wikipedia articles were translated from English into Thai. Then Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and Minister of ICT Chuti Krairiksh launched the site as part of Thailand’s Children’s Day celebrations. A crowd sourcing approach is being taken to proof read the articles after they have been machine translated.[6]
Google, Microsoft and SDL Language Weaver have also created SMT systems, some publicly accessible. Asia Online claims there are flaws in the existing processes and techniques of SMT and worked to resolve these issues. It claims three key differences from traditional SMT approaches:
The company characterizes its products as a "platform". By this they mean that there is a suite of independent tools and products that can work independently and together. Some are locally installed and some are only available in their SaaS. This is described in the CSA blog entry.
The Language Studio product suite was reviewed by Common Sense Advisory, a translation industry market research firm, in their Global Watchtower blog shown in the link below.
Supported languages are being added to on a regular basis[7].
Asian Languages
Available Now: Arabic (AR), Chinese (ZH), Japanese (JA), Bahasa Indonesia (ID), Korean (KO) and Thai (TH).
Under Development: Bahasa Malay (MS), Bengali (BN), Gujarati (GU), Hindi (HI), Punjabi (PA), Tagalog (TL), Tamil (TM), Vietnamese (VI).
European Languages
Available Now: Bulgarian (BG), Czech (CS), Danish (DA), Dutch (NL), English (EN), Estonian (ET), Finnish (FI), French (FR), German (DE), Greek (EL), Hungarian (HU), Irish (GA), Italian (IT), Latvian (LV), Lithuanian (LT), Maltese (MT), Norwegian (NO), Polish (PL), Portuguese (PT), Romanian (RO), Slovak (SK), Slovene (SL), Spanish (ES), Swedish (SV) and Russian (RU).