The Chinese government media reported that Premier Li Keqiang visited the
headquarters of ‘IOL8’ in Wuhan, China, yesterday. IOL8 is a cloud based
translation service platform owned by Transn, the largest Language Service
Provider (LSP) in China.
Founded in 2005, Transn was listed in February 2016 on China’s ‘New
Third Board’, an over-the-counter (OTC) market that facilitates fund raising
for startups and smaller companies. This market is non-public and has limited
liquidity but based on the last traded price on chinaipo.com, Transn has a market capitalization of USD 126.5m.
On its Chinese website,
Transn describes itself as being organized into two primary divisions –
Enterprise Language Solutions where they service large corporations and
government projects, and Internet of Language, their cloud based service
platform, which in its current incarnation is called IOL8.
In
2016, Transn invested in an AI company call TruMind in Beijing that specializes
in research and commercialization of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) to expand
its capabilities in this area.
The
current IOL8 website says it offers 30 APIs for developer integration and
translation services that combines MT and human translation to maximise
productivity. On its website, Transn claims its has 87 patents and 48 software
copyrights.
With
China’s economy still largely directed top down by the ruling Communist Party,
the Premier’s visit can be seen as a show of support from the central government
for the company.
The
visit could also be an indication that China’s push in taking
a lead in artificial intelligence includes
language and translation technology. More broadly the rapid productization of
neural machine translation has become a global phenomenon. On November 30,
2017, tech giant Amazon
launched Amazon Translate,
specifically targeting LSPs as a customer segment.
by Lance Ng on
December 12, 2017
Slator
Editor. Has been, at various times in his career, writer, translator, educator,
banker, financial advisor and entrepreneur.
https://slator.com/industry-news/chinas-largest-language-service-provider-gets-visit-prime-minister/
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