Asia Online

Asian Language Translated Portals

Asia Online is a consumer portals company. It was founded on the premise of being the leading consumer portal in South and Southeast Asia by providing vast quantities of compelling local language content where little existed previously and by unifying disparate markets with a common portal platform where language is no longer a barrier to communication. In order to provide vast amounts of content for the portal in each target market, it was first necessary to develop sophisticated machine translation technologies that can translate vast repositories of content, primarily in English, into the various local languages. Asia Online has developed these technologies over the last several years, and they matured to the point of commercial viability about 15 months ago. Although these technologies enable a number of potential business models, the best and most lucrative is Consumer Portals. The Enterprise Translation business was conceived later and developed as a supplemental revenue stream and as a means to achieve R&D goals using customer funded projects. The machine translation technologies are ready, the portal technologies are already being deployed, and the time in the market is right. Asia Online has begun the initial phases of the roll-out of its Consumer Portals. On January 7, 2011, Asia Online launched its Thai language portal with the entire 3.5 million pages of English language Wikipedia translated from English into Thai. A live feed is now in place with new Wikipedia articles and edits to existing articles being translated in near real-time. The website was launched by Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and ICT Minister Chuti Krairoek in conjunction with support from CAT Telecom as part of the Thai Childrenâ€s day celebrations. Asia Online has an additional business unit that licenses the translation platform and also offers a SaaS service to the translation industry and enterprises customers with mass translation requirements. This business unit has been operating for 15 months and is already profitable.