As a team of people with an unbridled passion for innovations in the Machine Translation industry, Monday’s news about Reverie Technologies, a Bengaluru-based startup bagging a $4M investment did not come as much surprise to us. This brilliant news serves to highlight once again that in the ever-changing world of retail marketing and globalization, any business with plans to accelerate their products into global markets needs to localize their content for enhanced user experience. This goes on to drive global revenues and increase brand equity in existing and new markets.
Sahil Kini, Vice President of Aspada, who will be joining Reverie’s board has very succinctly explained the need for translation and localization in India in his cleverly titled article, One LaaS Thing: Building the Indian Internet in local languages:
India is overwhelmingly vernacular. India by most estimates has between 100-120 million English speakers. That’s a measly 10% of the population… India has 220 mobile Internet users as of today, with 20 million additional users being added every quarter. While English language content accounts for 56% of the content on the Internet, Indian languages account for less than 0.1%. If we assume all those who could speak English were the earliest adopters of the mobile Internet, India still has anywhere between 100-160 million users that have no comprehension of the content presented to them.
As Kini explains, small to medium businesses fail to profit from the untapped market of consumers who have enough disposable income to be profitable, but have little to no English-language comprehension. Machine Translation today is advanced enough to be ‘taught’ about the intricacies of language and fed with exceptions in the language pair, thus ensuring that translations are domain specific and context-based. For example, the English word ‘love’ can be translated in at least three different ways in Hindi – pyaar (प्यार), mohabbat (मुहब्बत), and preeti (प्रीति) – depending on the context of the usage.
Again, as he goes on to point out, Indians have a propensity of using some English words while speaking in vernacular. So no one would probably ever say the Bengali word poribhasha (পরিভাষা) while talking about technology, but it makes sense to translate the rest of the sentence. And the good news is, with innovations in the field of Machine Translation, a business can create a translation engine that can be trained to translate according to the specific needs of the business and the local language!
Cloud-based Machine Translation services are scaling new heights all over the world, and in Europe, as well as beyond, we at KantanMT have been working tirelessly to change how businesses use content.
To know more about us, drop us a mail at info@kantanmt.com.
About KantanMT.com
KantanMT.com is a cloud based Statistical Machine Translation platform that offers members an intuitive, easy to navigate platform for building customised Machine Translation engines. KantanMT enables members to build domain specific engines for each of their clients and ensures that all data is fully encrypted and hosted on secure Amazon web servers. The KantanAPI™ enables members to fully integrate Machine Translation into their existing workflows, and using KantanAnalytics™ segment level quality analysis members can accurately evaluate the cost and schedule of a project.