Asia Online Receives Funding to Expand Automated Translation Platform
Asia Online today announced it has received second-round funding from T-One Capital. The new investment will be used to further sales and marketing of its world-leading automated statistical machine translation platform and to expand its efforts to eliminate language as a barrier to knowledge and global business.
Bangkok, Thailand (PRWEB) May 25, 2009 -- Asia Online, a leader in automated translation technologies and services, today announced that T-One Capital has become the company's second institutional investor.
T-One Capital's investment is an important milestone for Asia Online and is a key step in the validation and execution of the company's vision to deliver large volumes of local language content to the non-English speaking world. Asia Online has been delivering on its promise to provide unique services that enable[s] people to transcend language as a barrier to knowledge, and had previously raised its first-round investment from JAIC.
It has embarked upon "The World's Largest Literacy Project" and, starting with the Thai language, is providing access to information sources such as Wikipedia and the CIA World Fact Book in Asian languages via its automated statistical machine translation platform.
"We are very pleased to invest in Asia Online and look forward to a close partnership with the business to support its future growth," said Mr. Boriboon Amratisha, of T-One Capital. "Asia Online is transforming the way people communicate by overcoming the limitations imposed by language on the way we do business and access knowledge on the internet."
Mr. Dion Wiggins, CEO of Asia Online, said the company's efforts to bridge the information poverty gap have resulted in the development of unique technology and translation processes that are unrivaled. "Based upon our efforts to translate millions pages of valuable educational content into Thai - one of the toughest languages in the world for automated translation - we have developed an extremely powerful automated translation platform and all of the tools, processes and services needed to dramatically lower the cost of bulk translation projects."
Over the past year, Asia Online has evolved its proprietary technology and processes into a unified automated translation platform for businesses with bulk translation needs. According to Mr. Wiggins, the platform is currently returning high-quality, near-human results for a large number of language pairs, including Chinese to English, English to Spanish, English to French and many other language pair combinations. This support for a large variety of Asian and European languages has already netted the company a variety of projects to build customized statistical translation machine engines.
"We have been constantly evolving the Asia Online automated translation platform to further increase quality and performance," said Mr. Wiggins. "Our goal has been to improve not just the translation quality of the platform, but also to optimize the entire process of large-scale globalization projects."
To achieve the best translation quality, statistical machine translation engines are customized for specific purposes. For example, Asia Online has worked with Language Service Provider clients to build customized engines for translating technical and automotive documentation. However, building such engines has traditionally required large quantities of bi-lingual training data. Gathering large amounts of bi-lingual data can be a heavy burden for organizations, especially those seeking to translate between European and Asian languages.
"Much of our effort has been directed to overcoming barriers to machine translation," said Mr. Wiggins. "Extensive research with multiple sources, including TAUS and key Language Service Providers, has validated that our 'clean data' approach with streamlined data preparation and normalization processes reduce the need for bi-lingual data to as little as 1/100th of the 'dirty data' approach required by other solutions in the industry. Better still, projects that used to take months now take only weeks. The result is that we have been able to dramatically reduce the total costs and time associated with translation projects."
About Asia Online
Asia Online's unique services enable people to transcend language as a barrier to knowledge by providing unrivalled access to the limitless store of English-language content on the Internet, in their language of choice.
Asia Online's primary focus delivers huge amounts of content in local languages. In doing so it has created a core technological infrastructure that enables massive translation projects to be undertaken. Asia Online is working with language service providers and publishers with its unique infrastructure that facilitates the ongoing evolution of real time corrective improvements aimed at delivering machine translation quality second to none.
Formed in 2007, Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by a number of individual investors and institutional venture capital. Its headquarters are in Singapore, with operational headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand, where it conducts R&D and daily business operations.
About T-One Capital.
T-One Capital is an investment company owned jointly by Tonson Group and BBTV. Tonson Group is a diversified investment company building a portfolio of long-term holdings in high-performing assets and businesses in Thailand and around the world. Tonson Group was established in 2006 and is part of the BBTV Group family of businesses. BBTV operates and owns a range of companies including Thailand's Channel 7 TV station.
http://www.asiaonline.net
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