In another sign of the growing importance of language localization and translation as a business in itself, Amazon’s cloud computing division has announced that it has been been working on its own machine translation service they hope developers could soon be using to translate things like their websites and apps.
The online e-commerce giant already uses machine translation (also known as MT) as part of its operations for things like product information.
Now they essentially want to take that technology and open it up for use outside of the company through Amazon Web Services, not only commercializing it, but helping it evolve and grow to become a unique piece of software.
The upcoming announcement comes a few years after Amazon bought a translation company called Safaba which it then turned into the Amazon Machine Translation R&D Group.
Amazon is now going head to head with the other big players in MT such as Google and Microsoft in terms of selling it as a service as well as others who use MT as part of global operations such as Facebook.
Machine Translation has exploded over the past 5 or so years. According to CNBC the past few years have seen massive leaps in terms of advancements due to the adoption of deep learning.
Deep learning is a type of Artificial Intelligence that involves training software with tons of data and then getting it to make predictions and use its ‘intelligence’ to deal with new translations.
Translation certainly is a fast-moving, tech-powered and fundamental part of our global economy, as proven by Amazon now seeing its future growth as being tied to it.
