About Papago translation
Kim Jun-seok, leader of the Papago development team at Naver Labs, holds up his phone with the Papago app at Naver’s headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi. After earning a master’s degree in natural language processing from Pohang University of Science and Technology in Pohang, North Gyeongsang, he started working at LG Electronics in 2001 and spent six years doing voice recognition research. After joining Naver in 2007, Kim worked on search modeling and voice recognition and relocated to Naver Labs, a separate unit, to develop machine translation and the Papago project. [PARK SANG-MOON] After Rep. Lee Jung-hyun, chairman of the ruling Saenuri Party, vowed on Nov. 30 to “eat his hat” if the three opposition parties succeed in impeaching President Park Geun-hye - and then actually did on Dec. 2 - the internet was flooded with parodies of his imprudent remarks.Many memes were related to results that different translation apps gave for his traditional Korean expression “jangeul jijida,” which literally means “boiling soy sauce in one’s hand while lighting a fire under it.”While Google’s translation tool awkwardly interpreted the phrase as “hold my hand in my hand,” Papago, an app by Naver, the top search engine in Korea, showed the English expression “eat my hat.”It may just be one example, but the fluent result from Papago was an unexpected surprise, given its status as an app from a portal site operator whose brand recognition and global standing is perceived as far behind the artificial-intelligence giant Google. Papago’s translation result for jangeul jijida, left, compared to Google Translate’s version. [SCREEN CAPTURE] Papago, or “parrot” in Esperanto, is the first Korean-made app that relies on neural machine translation (NMT), a new, AI-based algorithm that is distinctive from traditional translation apps and services based on statistical machine translation (SMT). Papago can translate from Korean
Key features of the Papago translation that are enabled through these drivers include:
- Free translation service, Papago - Naver papago
- Free translation service, Papago - Naver Papago
- stunstunstun/papago: PAPAGO translate API with Python - GitHub
- Papago Translation - guide.ncloud-docs.com
- Naver Papago Translate for Android
- Papago - English to Korean Translation
- Papago Translate: A Comprehensive Review of the Popular Translation
To English and simplified Chinese and vice versa. (Translating between Korean and Japanese still relies on SMT.)Studies show NMT produces more accurate translations that are more natural in syntax and grammar than SMT and better reflect the way people actually speak.Naver released the Papago app in August, just eight months after researchers at its Naver Labs unit embarked on the project. Three months later, Google revamped its 10-year-old Google Translate app, switching it from SMT to NMT for English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish.Kim Jun-seok, leader of the Papago development team at Naver Labs, said internal evaluations showed the quality of Papago’s service was 60 out of 100 for Korean-English and English-Korean translation. That means the app still makes significant errors that a human translator would never make. Kim believes the score needs to get as high as 80 to actually satisfy users.“We still have 20 more to go,” the developer said during a recent interview at Naver’s headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi, “but since NMT has leapt past decades-old SMT in such a short span of time, it won’t be long before Papago reaches an even higher level.”The app, available on both Android and iOS, can translate typed text as well as speech and can optically recognize characters in a photograph, features that Google’s web and mobile translation service provides. The company says Papago will support six more languages - traditional Chinese, Spanish, French, Indonesia, Thai and Vietnamese - by next year.Unlike Google, Papago can detect whether a Korean speaker is asking a question or not by identifying the subtle rise in intonation. In Korean, some interrogative sentences have no change in word order and can only be inferred by tone.Kim said there were many other differences between the SMT and NMT.SMT, also known as phrase-based
