China to build national AI-assisted translation platform

BEIJING - Chinese AI giant iFlytek Wednesday announced a plan to work with China International Publishing Group (CIPG) to build a national translation platform based on its AI technologies.

Specializing in machine translation, iFlytek has been providing real-time Chinese-to-English translation and interpretation services for government organizations and companies both in China and abroad.

"The latest machine can translate Chinese to 33 languages. Our technologies in voice recognition, machine translation, and voice synthesis are leading in the world," said Liu Qingfeng, president of iFlytek.

According to Fang Zhenghui, the deputy director of CIPG, AI translation devices can lift the heavy burden off human translators.

Human translators can barely meet the ever-growing translation needs of government departments and Party offices at all levels and Chinese enterprises operating abroad, said Fang.

In the future AI translation platform, CIPG will open its corpus and database to iFlytek so as to improve the accuracy of machine translation.

Another human-machine cooperative translation platform will be mainly applied in publishing and international conferences.

"When translation machines fail to recognize some special nouns or specific terms, human translators can monitor the process and help to polish the text. The machine learn from these mistakes and improve its work next time," Liu said.

Once established, both platforms will also be able to offer efficient, accurate translation services to the public.