As part of my on-again/off-again commitment (which is no commitment at all, I suppose) to better blogging, I thought it might be worth posting some more general commentary on my general travels. So hopefully you'll be seeing a few more posts about the interesting folk that I get to meet as a course of what I do for a living ...
Anyway, on Thursday last week I caught up with Bob Hayward, director of IT advisory risk services at KPMG in Sydney. I first met Bob more than a decade ago when he was the Asia Pacific vice president for Gartner. Bob's role at KPMG sees him advising local CIOs on green tech strategies, but it's his other life that is the most intriguing.
Bob is also one of a team of four behind the resurrection of Asia Online, a company that has already had several lives through the dotcom boom and bust. Now the company has new life as a provider of statistical machine translation services that are bringing hundreds of thousands of pages of internet content in local Asian languages. Statistical machine translation works by comparing pages of pre-translated written content mathematically to form a model that can then be used on any new page of material. The workings of the process are complex, but the outcome is a better level of accuracy in translation than has ever been achieved before (by a machine at least). And thanks to the availability of cheap high-speed processing power, translation can now happen in near to real time.
The potential is now there to take millions of internet pages that are in English (or other languages) and translate them into the languages of Asia. While the internet may be ubiquitous, English-centric sites have restricted its reach. It will be interesting to see what Asia Online can do to redress the imbalance.
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