Asia Online 3 Hour Workshop 

As a special bonus event, colocated with the LRC Conference A special 3 hour workshop will be given by Dion Wiggins, Chief Executive of Asia Online: Tuesday 21 Sep 2010, 10:30 – 13:30 at the Carlton Castletroy Hotel, Castletroy, Limerick

This workshop will be broken into multiple sections and explore a number of elements of machine translation:

Section 1: The future of Machine Translation – What MT means to Enterprise and Language Service Providers 

This section will explore key trends in the MT industry; address many misconceptions of about machine translation. We will explore a variety of MT concepts, technologies and provide a core background on MT, present, past and future. We will investigate a variety of attitudes towards MT and concepts relation to translation overall that often get blurred when it comes to MT. We will look at a variety of models for LSPs and enterprises to use MT – we will also explore models on how LSPS and enterprises can monetize MT and integrate MT into their business. We will explore a mystical word called quality and examine what it is and what it means to various organizations in a variety of situations.

Section 2: Asia Online Language Studio™ Translation Platform.

This section will expand on the first, with a live demo of Asia Online Language Studio™ Pro desktop tools and Language Studio™ Enterprise translation platform. We will explore best practices in customizing a translation engine and go through the key steps one at a time that Asia Online performs in order to deliver a high quality translation engine. We will look at the creation of training data, aligning text from multiple documents in different languages, cleaning the data to ensure only high quality data is used to build the engine. Finally we will look at how to improve an engine’s quality – a process that is unique to Asia Online and shows the true impact of clean data and how the normal process of editing can rapidly improve the overall quality.

Attendance is free but people must register by emailing lrc@ul.ie

About Asia Online

Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by individual investors and institutional venture capital. Its corporate headquarters are in Singapore, and it has significant operations in Bangkok, Thailand, with R&D activities throughout Asia and expanding sales operations in Europe and North America.

Asia Online has developed technology that enables near-human quality mass translation of text across more than 500 language pairs. The technology is currently being deployed to assist enterprises and language service providers translate large amounts of information into their preferred languages and translate millions of pages of open content into local languages absolutely free to help eliminate information poverty in countries which are under served by such content.

Asia Online won the Red Herring Global 100 Award for "Most Promising Technology Startups" in January 2009 and was profiled recently by Gartner in their report entitled "Cool Vendors in Emerging Technologies, 2009."

The Localisation Research Centre (LRC) provides a comprehensive information service to the localisation industry; conducts research and development in localisation and related areas, such as language engineering; produces a range of publications including Localisation Focus - the International Journal of Localisation; and oversees a number of education and training programs.