Made in Asia, not just for Asia

By Eden Estopace | Jan 9, 2012

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language, says Salman Rushdie. Asia's Babel of more than a thousand languages spoken by 3.8 billion people is fast emerging as its greatest asset, with a little help from technology.

Many homegrown innovations have emerged in recent years to harness the power of Asian tongues to help spread development across the region's vast territory and support governments' vision of a more inclusive society.

By 2015, Asia will be home to half of the world's Internet population. "What a wonderful opportunity. This is our century," commented Alvaro Cellis, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Microsoft Asia Pacific, at the Accelerating Asia Pacific Conference 2011 in Kuala Lumpur last month. "When you think of innovation, it is the ability to harness the imagination and the potential of the people of a region in transforming ideas into products and services to create wellness, to create impact and make a difference."

Ananth Lazarus, Managing Director, Microsoft Malaysia, added that from Microsoft's experience, the key to creating successful technologies meant for the social good is public-private partnership. "We need to work together to bring the benefits of technology to as many as possible, and by doing so all of us can help drive exposure and economic development," he said.

Machine translation comes of age

Asia's two most populous countries - China and India -- have Internet populations of 477 million and 100 million, respectively. Millions of these Internet users, especially in the developing regions, do not speak English, the lingua franca of the Internet age. So, from Microsoft's labs in India and Asia, come two technologies that are helping bring content formerly available only in English to local communities in the language they know best.

WikiBhasha

Bhasha, said Edward Cutrell, Manager, Technology for Emerging Markets, Microsoft Research India, is a Sanskrit word which means language. WikiBhasha, announced in October 2010, is a multilingual content creation tool for Wikipedia that allows users to create content in many languages.

"We use machine translation  to help people generate content in places where English is not the dominant language. What we are able to do is give users a basic translation and allow them to edit it and improve the translation further," Cuttrel said.

While Wikipedia currently supports 270 languages and has over 14 million articles, statistics show the dominance of English content, compared to other languages. WikiBhasha expects to hasten the creation of non-English content and use the data from users to improve translation algorithms.

Currently, over 30 languages are supported by WikiBhasha, including non-Asian languages such as Finnish, Bulgarian,  Portuguese, Haitian, Polish or Turkish. Cutrell said the community of people producing information for the Web is growing and the tool is harnessing the transfer of knowledge in different languages.