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News
  • Asia Online Releases Free Language Studio LiteTM Solution to Improve Quality of Automated Translation
    Monday, June 8, 2009
  • Asia Online Receives Funding to Expand Automated Translation Platform
    Monday, May 25, 2009
  • Human-optimized SMT Technology Increases Productivity, Cuts Costs and Preserves Quality
    Thursday, February 05, 2009
  • Asia Online Wins Red Herring Global 100 Award for “Most Promising Technology Startups”
    Thursday, January 22, 2009
  • Tongue Twisters - Asia Online and Clay Tablet intertwine CMS with SMT
    Thursday, June 26, 2008
  • Asia Online Unveils Revolutionary Statistical Machine Translation Platform with 203 Language Pairs - Learns From Humans
    Wednesday, June 5, 2008
  • Asia Online and Andovar collaborate on IT, Technical and Educational content globalization services
    Friday, May 30, 2008
  • Asia Online and Braahmam Join Forces to Streamline Indian Translation
    Tuesday, April 29, 2008
  • Asia Online and McElroy Translation Join Forces for High Volume Translations
    Wednesday, May 21, 2008
  • Asia Online Speaks The Right Language To Attract Japanese Investment
    Monday, April 14, 2008
  • Asia Online Appoints Kirti Vashee VP of Sales for America's and Europe
    Tuesday, April 1, 2008
  • Startup to Increase Local Content
    Wednesday, November 21, 2007
  • A Short History of Asia Online
  • Talking In Tongues
    Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Asia Online Releases Free Language Studio LiteTM Solution to Improve Quality of Automated Translation
Asia Online Logo
News Release
Monday, June 8, 2009

Asia Online, a leader in automated translation technology, has unveiled Language Studio LiteTM, 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 LiteTM 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 LiteTM, 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 LiteTM, 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 LiteTM 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 LiteTM produces high-quality HTML reports and even exports results Microsoft Excel formats.

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

Features of Language Studio LiteTM

Translation Quality Evaluations - TQE

In order to alleviate subjectivity when examining the quality of translations, Asia Online Language Studio LiteTM has standardized the most common industry metrics into a single tool. Currently, Language Studio LiteTM 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 LiteTM 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.

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Asia Online Receives Funding to Expand Automated Translation Platform
Asia Online Logo
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.

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Human-optimized SMT Technology Increases Productivity, Cuts Costs and Preserves Quality
Asia Online Logo  McElroy Logo
News Release
Thursday, February 05, 2009

Next generation of machine translation with continuous human feedback loop debuts at LegalTech

Austin, TX (2 Feb 2009)—McElroy Translation, a full-service language services provider based in Austin, and its partner, automated translation technology expert Asia Online, are ushering in a new generation of human-optimized statistical machine translation technology which they are debuting at LegalTech this week in New York (LegalTech New York 2009, February 2 – 4, Booth 3301).

Just six months into their strategic partnership, the companies have combined Asia Online’s statistical machine translation platform and continuous improvement environment with McElroy Translation’s deep linguistic expertise in technical and patent translations to drastically cut the cost and time required for patent and discovery searches while providing increased quality of translation.

Experts comment that the McElroy-Asia Online collaboration has created an entirely new age in statistical machine translation.

“In patent retrieval, the statistical machine translation that is continuously improved through trained linguistic experts, allows us to search and retrieve the right, relevant information and then use human experts only for those documents that are relevant,” Francisco Webber, CEO of patent-retrieval leader, Matrixware Information Services GmbH. “This collaboration sets a new standard in the patent translation industry and helps us optimize the patent retrieval process.” MatrixWare is working with McElroy and Asia Online to create an environment for patent searches using this novel approach.

In a similar vein, industry research firm Common Sense Advisory stated in its predictions for 2009 that, "machine translation will open new markets in legal, patent, scientific and other free-form intellectual property discovery."

The Asia Online statistical machine translation platform is also an environment for collaborative and continuous improvement of automated translation output. Human subject-matter experts review the early translations and make any necessary corrections to perfect the text. This man-machine collaboration produces much higher translation quality than is possible by just using MT alone. The Asia Online system analyzes the human corrections in real time, allowing the system to learn dynamically so that all subsequent translations are improved. As Asia Online CEO Dion Wiggins explains, “The system does not make the same mistake twice.” McElroy provides the subject-matter experts and linguists needed to rapidly raise the output quality of the SMT engine prior to deployment, and to ensure the continued and ongoing improvements in the system’s scope of vocabulary and quality of translation.

Litigation 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. In addition to reducing the overall cost of translation, this approach leaves the legal judgment in the hands of the legal experts, rather than having to rely on untrained linguists to “score” foreign language documents for relevancy.

”The goal is to use technology to eliminate the middle-man in the search and evaluation process, saving the human translation budget for documents known to be relevant to the case at hand,” said Bob Donaldson, Vice President of Strategy at McElroy Translation.”Our competence with this new human optimized SMT approach, also enables us to undertake other ‘huge’ translation projects like technical support knowledge bases and complex product development content to produce high quality translations at a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time. “

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. 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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Asia Online Wins Red Herring Global 100 Award for “Most Promising Technology Startups”
Asia Online Logo  Red Herring Logo
News Release
Thursday, January 22, 2009

Asia Online, a firm that is translating millions of pages of Internet content into Asian languages via its unique Translation Technology Platform, has been awarded the coveted Red Herring Global 100 Award which recognizes the best global startups with innovative and potentially disruptive technologies.

San Francisco / Singapore / Bangkok (20 January 2009): Asia Online, a firm dedicated to eliminating information poverty by bringing the world's knowledge to every person through its unique online Translation Technology Platform, today announced it has received top honors in the Red Herring Global 100 most promising technology startups. After winning the Red Herring Asia 100 Award in December 2008 and advancing to the next round, winning the Global Award places Asia Online in the league of previous Red Herring winners, such as Google, Skype and YouTube, all whom Red Herring accurately predicted would alter the way people use the Internet and engage with the digital economy.

The Red Herring award is considered the pinnacle accolade for technology startups. For the past decade, technology industry executives, investors, and observers have regarded the Red Herring 100 lists as an invaluable instrument to discover and advocate the promising startups that will lead the next wave of disruption and innovation. The Red Herring's editorial team has diligently surveyed entrepreneurship around the globe during 2008, scouring thousands of privately held companies and meticulously selected 1800 of the top companies from Europe, North America, and Asia. Evaluations were made on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, innovation, management, global strategy, and ecosystem integration. The announcement of the winners was made at the Red Herring 100 Global conference which took place in San Diego from January 14-16, 2009. Present among the finalists were elite executives and venture capital leaders from around the world.

According to Dion Wiggins, CEO of Asia Online, the award comes at an opportune time: “With Western markets in turmoil, many investors are looking to growth in Asia for opportunities. Asia Online is well positioned to become the leading player in the online space in many Asian markets, which combined are set to dwarf the North American and European markets in terms of both users and content. Red Herring’s selection of Asia Online for this top award is a validation of the opportunities still present in region, and also of our unique position.”
Startup   Year   Current Market Value
Google 1998 US$94 Billion
Salesforce.com   2004 US$3.4 Billion
Skype 2005 Acquired by EBay in 2005 for US$2.6B
YouTube 200 Acquired by Google in 2006 for US$1.65B
Asia Online 2009 Privately funded

Established in January 2007, Asia Online had already made a big impact on the global market. In April 2008, the firm unveiled its powerful online Translation Technology Platform that uses advanced artificial intelligence to not only translate over 200 language-pairs, but also learns from humans as they proofread and edit documents. The firm now has alliances with the world's leaders in language services, such as Andovar, Braahmam, Eqho Communications, and McElroy Translation.

Asia Online's ambition goes far beyond offering world-leading translation technology through its unique online technologies that learn from humans and its crowd-sourcing business model. Its true aim is to make all of the world's knowledge available to every citizen, no matter which language they speak. Called, "the World's largest literacy project," Asia Online is translating tens-of-millions of pages of educational, scientific and historic English-language content into Asian languages.

This content comes from highly valued open sources, such as Wikipedia (the world's seventh most popular online destination), the World Fact Book and tens-of-thousands of published books and essays, and open courseware. Asia Online is also working with publishers of popular English language magazines and publications to translate their materials into Asian languages. This project will effectively eliminate information poverty and provide the same knowledge to every person, regardless of cultural background. On top of this, Asia Online is set to deploy social network services that have proven popular in the West, but have been inaccessible to Asian consumers due to language barriers.

But to what end? Gregory Binger, Chairman of Asia Online, sees huge potential for the Asian Internet market: "Currently, Asia represents 39% of all global Internet users, but the region has an Internet penetration rate of just 15% of the population. By 2012, 50% of global Internet users will be in Asia, with strong continued growth expected beyond 2115. In contrast, Western markets are nearly saturated with North America already at 75% Internet penetration rates.”

Click to enlarge: Internet Users
Country Population (Million) and Internet Penetration

Asia Online’s initiative is not only beneficial for Asia’s burgeoning economies, but also as a springboard to generating new market wealth: "The biggest bottleneck in growing -- and making money from -- the Asian Internet is lack of compelling content," said Mr. Binger. "Although Asia will soon represent nearly half of the world's Internet users, less than 14% of Internet web pages are in Asian languages. Worse, less than 0.03% of content is in an Asian languages other than Chinese, Japanese or Korean. This means that the bulk of the world's population have restricted access to global content... language has traditionally created a significant barrier to learning and knowledge, and this in turn is limiting the growth of many non-English-speaking nations. This is a root cause of information poverty around the globe."

"We believe that language should never be a barrier to knowledge. By eradicating the language barrier, Asia Online will not only be helping build the nations of Asia by proving free access to knowledge, but we will also be positioning ourselves as the gateway to such knowledge. This gives us many opportunities to monetize our position in the market, through advertising as well as introducing a range of services that have been proven money-makers in the West" said Mr. Binger.

A recent article by Gizmag likened Asia Online's strategy to "being able to go back in time to the start of the Internet, and being able to make all the right moves because you knew how the web would be monetized, the importance of search and how to leverage it, which business models would work, and which ones wouldn't." Given that Asia Online will house over 1 billion pages of Asian-language content by 2011, such statements are well-founded.

About Asia Online Pte Ltd (www.asiaonline.net)
Asia Online’s unique services are enabling people to transcend language as a barrier to knowledge by increasingly 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.

About Red Herring (www.redherring.com)
Red Herring is a global media company, which unites the world’s best high technology innovators, venture investors and business decision makers in a variety of forums: a leading innovation magazine, an online daily technology news service, technology newsletters and major events for technology leaders around the globe. Red Herring provides an insider’s access to the global innovation economy, featuring unparalleled insights on the emerging technologies driving the economy.
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Tongue Twisters - Asia Online and Clay Tablet intertwine CMS with SMT
Asia Online Logo  Clay Logo
News Release
Thursday, June 26, 2008

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.

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

Asia Online Logo
News Release
Wednesday, June 5, 2008

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
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.

EXECUTIVES
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
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

News Release
Friday, May 30, 2008

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

News Release
Tuesday, April 29, 2008

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

News Release
Wednesday, May 21, 2008

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
Asia Online Logo
News Release
Monday, April 14, 2008

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
Asia Online Logo
News Release
Tuesday, April 1, 2008

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
News01
Database Section
Wednesday, November 21, 2007

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
Asia Online Logo

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

Database Section
Wednesday, September 19, 2007

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. 

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 Internet in any language they wish.

A lot of work can be taken care of in the pre- and post-processing. For instance, Chinese numbering refers to 52,000 as "five point two ten thousand", which would need to be translated into "fifty-two thousand" for both English and Thai. Other engineers are working on a name and place recognition pre-processor that will tag words that need to be translated phonetically.

Professor Kohen and the Asia Online staff declined to show the quality of Thai translation just yet, though they promised it would be better than anything else available when it is formally launched.

Time will tell.

One key improvement of the raw algorithms will be the development of specialised domains. For instance, language used in car manuals is quite different from legal documents and from chatrooms. Wiggins said that the system will feature thousands of domains, which will be one of the unique points of the Asiao Online SMT engine.

For languages with insufficient texts, like Khmer, SMT algorithms can triangulate with two or more different languages, for instance merging Japanese-Khmer with English-Khmer parallel copra. This has successfully been used to train SMT systems for Gaelic, Welsh and Catalan and other "low resource" languages.

The Bible and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have been very useful as it has been translated into every major language. For Asia, Wiggins is eyeing the Buddhist Tripitaka for use to train the engine.

Asked if this would mean that Asia Online will be able to translate into ancient languages such as Pali, still used widely in Buddhist rituals, and Sanskrit, Wiggins laughed and said, "Let's get Thai working first."

Republished with the kind permission of Bangkok Post
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