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ASEAN to Develop Web Translation Software
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is developing a software that can translate English-language Web pages and e-mail messages into the various languages of ASEAN, a US market research company reported on Tuesday.
The Internet content will be translated into the languages spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, the Philippines and Vietnam, said the report.
The project is aimed at helping reduce the digital divide as well as the gap between people with access to global telecommunications resources and those without, as the vast majority of people in these countries cannot understand written English.
The project will receive technical assistance from Tokyo-based NEC, which has already built a similar system capable of translating Internet content in English, French, German, Spanish and Chinese into Japanese.
The languages of Southeast Asian countries come from several different language families, with widely varying grammar and syntax. This makes development harder than in similar projects previously carried out in Europe, where all the major languages belong to the Indo-European language family. The project is expected to take up to five years to complete, and it will cost several million US dollars, the report added.
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