Wednesday, August 12, 2009

I2R Launches A New Language Translator

A*Star's Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) has launched a prototype translation program, which has potential as an add-on service for portable devices and mobile phones in future. It took three years for the Institute to design the software in the first phase of its development.

It is a combined effort of the 8 countries of the Asian Speech Translation Advanced Research Consortium that was founded by China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea and Thailand in 2006. Singapore and Vietnam joined the consortium in 2008.

The consortium expects to bring in few more countries as it proceeds into the second phase of the project. This would let the Institute to add more languages and expand the use of the program.

Li Haizhou, department head of human language technology at I2R, said the program could be installed Java enabled device as software, similar to Skype. Internet connection is necessary as it is a network-based translation system that connects to the servers located in each participating country. These servers will act as "translation centers" where each member country handles a certain language