Korean Specialized AI Translation by "NAVER Papago"

(DeepL now supports Korean. For more details, check out "How Is DeepL's Translation Accuracy in Korean?")

 

When it comes to AI translation services, DeepL and Google are pretty well-known, but are you familiar with NAVER's Papago? Perhaps you have used it to read Korean articles about K-pop groups like BTS and Blackpink.

 

Papago is an automatic translation service that uses neural machine translation technology to translate between Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese, and more. A free version is available here, where you can test the translation accuracy. (Note that any information entered in the free version may be repurposed by NAVER for training and other purposes, so take care not to input confidential information.)

NAVER Papago can provide translations that are contextually appropriate and not just literal translations. It can naturally translate sentences that would feel awkward if translated word-for-word, making it suitable for conversations, novels, and other contexts where conveying the underlying meaning is essential.

Many other translation apps tend to provide literal translations that mirror the original wording, while NAVER Papago is highly rated by those seeking accurate and natural translations. In addition, users can customize the dictionaries used for translations by, for example, adding vocabulary related to specific fields, such as technical terms or industry jargon.

As a sidenote, DeepL provides a search engine called Linguee, and Google, obviously operates a search engine as well. Both companies utilize data collected from their own search engines to develop and improve their machine translation services. It is clear that owning a search engine and its search database is a significant advantage when developing high-precision machine translation services.

 

NAVER Corporation also provides the search engine called NAVER. It is easy to assume that they are developing and improving the Papago automatic translation service using this search database, which contains a massive amount of content, primarily in Korean.

 

However, translation support tools used widely in the translation industry, namely SDL Trados Studio and Memsource, do not support Papago. This prevents translation departments and translation companies that focus on translation work from really using Papago. But despite this, there is a call to use Papago for translation work, and we have received such requests from our clients.

 

In response, our automatic translation solutions, MTrans for Trados and MTrans for Phrase TMS, now support Papago. They also accommodate glossaries and style replacement (automatic text replacement), which are not part of Papago's standard features but allow you to specify translations for things like company and product names and to unify the translation style in a polite grammar form. This improves translation accuracy compared to using Papago alone. Additionally, when utilizing Papago through one of our services, the original text and translations are never reused for other purposes, ensuring confidentiality, so you can take advantage of Papago's automatic translations with peace of mind.

 

If you would like to use Papago for translation services, please consider MTrans for Trados or MTrans for Phrase TMS. You can give it a try with a free trial.

 

Related Services

MTrans for Trados

MTrans for Phrase TMS