South Korea’s internet portal giant Naver Corp on Wednesday will release the official version of its artificial intelligence(AI)-based multilingual machine translation service Papago capable of translating long text with up to 5,000 words. It had introduced the beta version in August last year.

Naver said on Tuesday that it would release Papago application upgrade for android-based and iPhone smartphone users on Wednesday. After the upgrade, Papago’s one-time translation capability will be expanded from up to 200 words per text to 5,000 words or the same as that of Google’s Translate app. It will also introduce Papago for computer users that tend to have greater demand for translating longer text like a piece from news articles and research papers on the same day.

Papago is an automated machine translation service based on large neural network that translates text and phrases into other language by analyzing context instead of translating based on statistical analysis.

The beta version launched last summer is capable of translating texts of up to 200 words based on neural network translation method. If the text becomes longer than 200 words, it switches to run on statistical machine translation method because the AI-based analysis requires greater use of computing resources than the company can afford.

But now the company is ready to launch the official version of Papago after ramping up its network facilities and upgrading related services, said an unnamed Naver official.

Papago currently offers translation service in six different languages including Korean, English, and Japanese. Naver plans to add Vietnamese

By Oh Chan-jong

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