Asia Online is the first technology supplier to have addressed the need to develop a statistical machine translation (SMT) solution in Asia for often data-poor Asian languages. Building on an initial set of technology that has its roots in the open source Moses engine, Asia Online has used this technical knowledge to develop a comprehensive commercial enterprise-class SMT-as-a-service platform.

Asia Online is also a large-scale user of machine translation in its own Asian context, enabling it to learn about and develop solutions to challenging translation and quality issues.

Overall, the company’s main thrust is to encourage the development of SMT engines by combining intensive human work with machine processing in a virtuous circle. By concentrating on this process in the initial ramp-up period, Asia Online offers higher quality, better-tuned engines in the subsequent stages of its development. It is therefore interested in building an ecosystem of partners and users to develop a broad range of high quality engines/language pairs.