Got steak when you ordered salad? Sogou seeks to help tourists breach language barrier

Wang Xiaochuan, founder and chief executive officer of Sogou Inc., is crystal clear on what the Chinese search-engine operator should do, and more perhaps more importantly, what it should not.

A top priority on his to-do list is developing language-related products and services to solve the barrier that businesses and consumers face when communicating with others who don’t share a common language. On the “to avoid” list is what chief competitor Baidu Inc. is focusing on: autonomous driving.

“We are very focused,” Wang, 39, said in an interview in Beijing, where the company was introducing two translation devices. “We focus on languages – it’s our core, like visuals, voice and we turn them into text. We focus on picking on our projects and we are very precise [about that].”

As the second-placed Chinese search engine in an increasingly winner-takes-all internet industry, Sogou has had to carve out a profitable and sizeable niche. Sogou sees demand for translation driven by the surge in outbound tourism from China, which the China Tourism Academy estimates will increase from 122 million travellers in 2016 to 200 million by 2020.

Sogou’s travel translator can translate spoken words even if there is background noise, and also make sense of text embedded in images, such as on menus and street signs, according to a company release. The device can translate 17 languages into Chinese and vice versa, including major European languages like French and Spanish to Asian tongues like Japanese, Korean and Hindi.

Although more than 90 per cent of Sogou’s revenues come from its search and advertising business, for many Chinese speakers, Sogou is better known for its text input software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to predict and recommend phrases using the standard pinyin romanisation for Chinese. It was China’s No. 1 language-input software in September 2017, according to iResearch.