Naver's translation app boasts 10 mln users

By Kim Han-joo

SEOUL, April 23 (Yonhap) -- South Korea's dominant Internet portal and search engine Naver Corp. said Tuesday that its mobile translation application Papago has brought in more than 10 million users.

The number of monthly active users, or MAUs, surpassed the 10-million mark in March after garnering 20 million accumulated downloads to become the most popular translation tool in the country, the company said, citing a survey conducted by App Annie, an app analytics company.

Papago, which provides translations services in 13 languages, is powered by Neural Machine Translation (NMT) technology, a deep-learning framework that learns from millions of examples.

Naver said Papago improves its translation quality by gathering big data. Instead of breaking down sentences into phrases, Papago takes overall context into consideration, it added.

The South Korean firm said the quality of the four most-used languages -- Korean, English, Japanese and Chinese -- are about 27 percent more accurate than other translation services.

Major IT firms from both home and abroad have in recent years launched NMT-based translation services, including Google Inc.'s Google Translation and local software firm Hancom Inc.'s GenieTalk,

Naver also embedded its Papago service into its web browser, named Whale, allowing users to browse and translate websites without leaving the page.

khj@yna.co.kr
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