Naver's Papago app outperforming Google's translation service

Naver said the number of monthly active users of its mobile translation application Papago reached 10 million in March. / Courtesy of Naver

By Jun Ji-hye

Naver's mobile translation application Papago has been outperforming Google's translation service in Korea, becoming the most popular translation tool here, the Korean company said Tuesday.

The nation's dominant internet portal and search engine said the number of monthly active users (MAUs) of the Papago app reached 10 million in March, garnering 20 million accumulated downloads since the service was launched in July 2017.

The Papago app began to overtake Google Translate in August last year and has extended its lead since then, according to Naver.

Citing a survey conducted by App Annie, an app analytics company, Naver said the gap between MAUs of the Papago app and those of Google Translate here was about 1 million in March.

Papago provides translations services in 13 languages and is powered by neural machine translation (NMT) technology.

The Korean IT company said consistent growth of Papago is a result of its efforts to advance service quality.

Citing results of tests conducted by the firm as well as external organizations, Naver said translation quality of the four most-used languages ― Korean, English, Japanese and Chinese ― appeared to be 27 percent more accurate than other translation services on average.

The firm plans to improve service quality for Vietnamese as demand for the language is growing.

The company has also made technological improvements, advancing accuracy of its optical character recognition (OCR) feature, which recognizes text in photos and translates it.

The improved OCR engine is offered in Japanese for now, the firm said, noting that it will expand the service to Chinese, English and Korean within the year.

“We have made consistent advancement in translation quality based on a vast amount of data,” said Shin Joong-hui who supervises the Papago service.

The firm added the web version of Papago has grown as well, with its MAUs having increased from 664,000 in March 2018 to 1.6 million in March this year, citing a survey conducted by market research firm Nielsen Koreanclick.

Among web-based translation service providers, Google has continued to take the No. 1 position, garnering 2.5 million MAUs in March.

But Naver said MAUs of the web version of Papago have grown by 2.7 times from a year earlier, while those of Google Translate decreased by 5 percent during the same period.