Google, Naver in all-out war for accurate translation service in South Korea
Artificial intelligence increases accuracy in full sentence translations, ‘and the figure is expected to reach higher as more data piles up over time’
By Lee Min-hyung
With artificial intelligence (AI) taking the technology world by storm, global IT firms are identifying intelligent translation services as their next key growth area.
The paradigm shift in translation comes as conventional statistical machine translation (SMT) has so far failed to generate satisfactory outcomes, due to its heavy reliance on computerised statistics which have not been able to translate languages in a more human-like, natural way.
However, AI is now serving as the “brain” for the next-generation neural machine translation (NMT) services, with global portal giants ― such as Google, Baidu and Naver ― launching their own platforms equipped with the AI-based translation technology.
The NMT-based services enable users to translate different languages more naturally, as the AI system analyses and translates the entire sentence, unlike the previous phrase-based translation system.
Another striking feature of the NMT is that it can learn by itself and generate more human-like translation outcomes through big data, whereas the SMT requires manual input to add more data to improve its functions.
Naver vying with Google in Korean translation