Asia Online - Differences From Other Approaches

Differences From Other Approaches

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:

• Clean data – The traditional approach leveraged content found on the web in corporate sites, news articles and other similar sources where the same content was available in multiple languages. The quality of the data was very low. Asia Online has focused machine and human resources in this area to ensure that the data is as clean and as accurate as possible. Data is sourced from high-quality translations provided by book publishers and translation companies and is aligned at the segment level (usually sentences) and converted into a consistent format in order to be processed by the learning software. This step includes:
  • Extracting segments from files and documents if they are not in a TMX format.
  • Aligning segments (if necessary) once they have been extracted. While this is automated by machines, humans are also used to validate the accuracy.
  • Converting data to a base UTF-8 encoding for training the SMT system.
  • Extracting small subsets from the data to guide training.
  • Reviewing, cleaning and analyzing the data to ensure optimal training impact.
• Multiple domains - Extensive efforts have been put into a system that allows for training in many domains. This is done by extending a base set of information with multiple additional learning sources.
• Real-time corrections
• Languages available – Asia Online currently has more than 520 language pairs available in a baseline form and is progressively deploying 15 domains across each language pair. Another 200+ language pairs are under development. These systems are currently used to build customized translation systems for corporate and language service provider (LSP) customers who add their bilingual parallel corpus to the existing data to create higher quality translation systems.

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.