By Lee Min-hyung
Hancom has joined the toughening translation service competition against portal giants Google and Naver, combining its deep learning expertise with its own translation platform, the company said Wednesday.
The nation’s largest office software operator said it has upgraded its GenieTalk software by combining neural machine translation (NMT) technology with its existing rule-based machine translation (RBMT) service.
NMT has stunned local users with its human-like and satisfactory translations. This is because the AI system translates entire sentences, whereas decades-old computerized statistics have so far taken a phrase-based translation approach.
“The new GenieTalk service is different from the local competitors in that we offer the hybrid translation service ― which includes RBMT and NMT,” a Hancom spokeswoman said.
“The RBMT serves as the building block to check grammatical errors for potential outcomes, with the NMT keeping to compiling datasets to generate more natural translation output.”
Hancom is the third company here to tap into the NMT-based translation industry, following Naver and Google. Naver, the Seoul-based portal with the top market share domestically, unveiled its NMT translation app, Papago, last October, offering language translation services using Korean, Chinese, Japanese and English.
The next month, the U.S.-based technology titan also launched an upgraded version of the globally renowned Google Translate service with its own AI algorithm. At that time, the company expressed confidence about the growth potential for the new service, backed by its big data and machine learning expertise.
The accuracy of the NMT service is expected to reach much higher, as it automatically piles up more data over time. For this reason, conventional translation service operators are losing ground after their failure to embrace the data-driven technology shift.
“We are going to differentiate our services by focusing on improving accuracy especially for less-frequently-used expressions through our hybrid translation service,” the Hancom official said.
“Hancom plans to add the NMT function into four languages ― Korean, English, Japanese and Chinese ― this month,” she added.
The company hopes to use the upcoming PyeongChang Winter Olympics as a stepping stone to raise its global profile, as GenieTalk has been named the official translation service for the Olympic Games in Korea next February.
The firm expects more than 40,000 athletes, members of the international press and other visitors from here and abroad to use the service at the weeks-long Olympics.