News Archive / Language translator offers telcos new opportunity? 19.07.2010

A Star's Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) has launched a prototype translation program, which has potential as an add-on service for portable devices and mobile phones in future.

Li Haizhou, department head of human language technology at I2R, said the program can be used as an add-on to mobile phones that telcos can offer by subscription. The project is a collaborative effort of the eight countries of the Asian Speech Translation Advanced Research Consortium that was founded by China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea and Thailand in 2006. Singapore and Vietnam joined the consortium in 2008.

Li said the program can be installed onto any Java-enabled device as a software, similar to Skype. Internet connection is necessary as it is a network-based translation system that connects to the servers located in each participating country. These servers will act as "translation centers" where each member country handles a certain language, for example Singapore translates from the Malay language while Japan will translate from Japanese.

The program requires some fine-tuning if it is to be used by service providers or potential partners, he said. When asked about the official release of the program, Li said "it will still take a couple of years".

source: http://www.zdnetasia.com

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