By JONAH GREENBERG
(Virtual China News, June 8) A language software company based in Israel will try to translate its way into the China market through the three strategic partnerships with major Chinese Web portals the company announced Tuesday.
Babylon.com will offer a co-branded version of its free translation software on the Sina.com, China Daily.com, and ChinaVista portal sites.
The decision to work with the China-based portals signals Babylon's desire to quickly enter one of the fastest growing Internet markets in the world.
"China is one of the emerging markets," said Michal Frenkiel, the company's vice president for business development. "We'd like to grow with it rather than enter it after it's already grown," she said in a telephone interview.
A Dozen Tongues
Babylon.com offers a free multi-language dictionary service that can be used online or downloaded for use offline. The program translates single words from English into ten different languages including Chinese. It cannot actually read the meaning of the English text, but instead it uses an optical technology that indentifies the word by the pixels on the screen.
The free software, or "freeware," will soon be available for download on the three Chinese portals, which could bring massive numbers of new users to Babylon.com. Frenkiel described the arrangement as "another distribution channel for us," and added that the deals will also allow the Chinese portals to offer the service to their users. Word of mouth has been Babylon.com's most effective form of marketing since the company was first formed in 1997, she said. Babylon.com also offers currency and time zone conversions online.
Currently the translation software can only translate from English into other foreign languages, but not the other way around. In addition to Chinese (both simplified and traditional characters), languages include Spanish, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Hebrew, and Swedish. According to Frenkiel the technology will most likely enable translation in both directions at some point in the future.
Adding Chinese language capability was "easy" for Babylon.com, Frenkiel said, because they already offered Japanese and Hebrew, both of which require double byte technology. When input on a computer the written characters of both Chinese and Japanese require two bytes of memory to the one byte required by letters of the Roman alphabet.
Free Speech
Government agencies in China have expressed concern in recent months about the unchecked flow of information on the Internet and Babylon could conceivably facilitate more exchange between Chinese Web surfers and their foreign counterparts. Babylon.com has not registered its product with regulatory authorities in China, but the company doesn't expect any problems.
"We have had a lot of good press in China. We haven't had any bad experiences at all," Frenkiel said.
Babylon.com offers its service and software for free and still does not make money. The company plans to bring in revenue soon with advertising placed on the company's Web site, in its newsletter, and in the downloadable software itself. The company originally decided to put off seeking revenue through advertising, choosing to focus first on attracting a substantial user base. Currently, Babylon.com has nearly 5 million registered users, Frenkiel said.
"When you want to sell advertising you need to have the critical mass. Now we have that, so now it's interesting," she said.
The Babylon.com application, which can run alongside a user's browser or other programs, offers only word by word translations and cannot translate an entire page or even a paragraph.
There are other companies that currently offer more thorough translation technology. Hong Kong's Readworld.com and IBM's Machine Translation allow a user to translate entire paragraphs. While Readworld can translate between English and Chinese in both directions, Machine Translation functions more like Babylon -- from English into Chinese and other languages. Both technologies can offer an initial, essential translation, but they cannot guarantee accuracy.
IBM also has a product called Native Search, which allows a Web user to surf English language search engines by typing in a Chinese word.
Lost in Translation
Alta Vista's Babel Fish translation service is another "gisting" service that translates roughly between English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian (but it cannot translate between all of them interchangeably).
The Alta Vista hopes eventually to offer Chinese, according to company spokesman Jim Shissler, but has not announced when it might be ready. Currently the Alta Vista search function can search Chinese Web pages, as well as many other languages.
"I think we'll slowly migrate that technology over to the translation side," Shissler said. "We're very sensitive to the users we have internationally."
Over half of Alta Vista's 60 million unique monthly users access the portal's network from outside U.S., though many are in Europe, Shissler said.
Shissler admits that the Babel Fish translation service isn't perfect.
"It is, in our opinion, functional," he said. "It gives you a clean and easy way to explore the pages in another language without putting a heavy burden on the user."
Babylon.com hopes to offer shares on the NASDAQ exchange in the "close future," Frenkiel said.
To reach Jonah Greenberg email: jgreenberg@virtualchina.com
