Analysis of the Current Development of Machine Translation and Interpretation in Korea: Focusing on Korean-Chinese Language Pairs

Abstract

With the application of artificial intelligence technologies, machine translation and interpretation has recently made rapid progress. In Korea, Naver Corp., Hancom Interfree Inc., and Systran International Co. Ltd. took lead in providing desktop- and mobile-based translation and interpreting services. All three enterprises apply neural machine translation (NMT), currently the latest technology in machine translation. However, they have different characteristics: Naver, the largest Web portal site in Korea, quickly responds to colloquial expressions or newly coined words by using various types of content as data for translation engine. Hancom Interfree developed Genietalk; its hybrid translation engine combines the strengths of NMT and rule-based machine translation (RBMT), and thus enhances the accuracy of translation. Capitalizing on the advantages of a translation software company, Systran features expertise of translation by industry and area. These ever-evolving machine translation and interpretation are expected to satisfy daily demands for interpretation in shopping and tourism, demands for community interpretation from foreigners living in Korea including marriage immigrants, and temporary demands for translation and interpretation from international events including Olympics. However, in professional areas, it is hard to replace human translation and interpretation with machines in a short term. Rather, the efficiency of translation and interpreting jobs is expected to improve through cooperation between human beings and machines.