In addition to the Amikai-powered translation services that are provided for free on a number of portal and ISP Web pages, Amikai provides a for-pay translation service, primarily for business clients, called Amikai Enterprise. We do not currently have usage statistics that we can release. However, the pay service reaches a significantly different audience than the free service. The portal and ISP translation services include translated browsers, translated chat and simple text translations. Amikai Enterprise is integrated with common desktop applications such as Microsoft Office and Outlook, and the translations are optimized for language as used in a business setting.

Amikai's products incorporate a mixture of in-house, as well as licensed, technologies. While the core translation engines are currently licensed from other companies, Amikai continues to develop its own technologies. Our current emphasis, and the area where we feel we can make the most significant contribution, is to increase the usability and quality of currently available translation products. We do this by improving translation quality for specific translation applications, by innovating interfaces and links to other software, and by improving the stability of translation software.

Amikai has become a leader in the field of on-line machine translation because we provide high-quality translations that are geared to specific communication usages. For example, our translated chat rooms are optimized for chat-specific language, while our translated Web browsers consult special dictionaries to improve coverage of the language common to Web pages.

In addition, we have built a server farm that guarantees stable access to fast translations, regardless of which of the 29 language pair-directions one is translating. Finally, Amikai also places a special emphasis on the user experience, and we feel this pays off in a more useful and enjoyable product. This conclusion has been supported by the feedback from clients and end-users who repeatedly tell us that we have a higher-quality translation product than most other services they have tested.

When Amikai designs an application, a number of factors are taken into consideration. First, we consider how the tool is used – whether the translated inputs are short or long, the time-sensitivity of the translation requests and the appropriateness of MT quality. Next, we study the basic composition of the language to be translated – the prototypical vocabulary, commonly repeated phrases and recurrent sentence structures. At this stage, the analysis is language-specific, and separate processing and lexicography must be performed for each source language.

It means that for each language pair that we support we provide access to the (single) best translation engine available on the market. We run tests on available engines to determine the best overall for our purposes, and then license that technology.

The idea of dynamically choosing among a variety of translation engines is just one innovation that Amikai has experimented with in our quest to improve translation quality. The program simultaneously sends the same translation request to a number of engines, and then matches each result against a statistical language model to see which result best fits language patterns the program has "seen" in the past. While this feature is not part of our current commercial offerings, it is an example of the innovation that we bring to the field of MT.

This approach was inspired by the work of Kevin Knight, a professor at the University of Southern California. Professor Knight has used language models as a component of his statistical MT algorithms, and Amikai has adapted this part of his approach to the task of evaluating MT engine outputs. Statistical language modelling is a very flexible and promising tool, and we are excited about this possible application.

Amikai believes strongly that MT is not a replacement for Human Translation (HT), but rather, MT is appropriate and useful in situations where constraints such as time and cost make HT unfeasible. Those situations include communication where the turnaround time must be nearly instantaneous (such as chat), where the amount of text is prohibitively large (such as large datastores), and where the text is continuously updated (such as the Web).

Amikai feels that MT and HT are highly complementary. HT provides the highest quality of translation for sites which are very brand-sensitive or which require high accuracy (such as legal information). MT allows users to access sites that have not been translated by humans and, which otherwise, would remain inaccessible due to the language barrier.

Although most of our translations have been performed through Web portals or ISP's, we do not consider those to be B2C sales. The application user is the portal visitor or ISP customer, but Amikai's customer is the portal or ISP itself. We are now also expanding into enterprise-oriented translations. To Amikai, both of these scenarios are B2B. However, in the first case, the primary user of the MT service is outside of the client company, while in the enterprise case, the primary user is within the client company.

There are many uses for MT in international business. Translated chat is useful for collaboration among linguistically diverse teams. Translated Web browsers facilitate corporate research across language barriers. Translated email eases communication both within and outside of an international business. Translated Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets and Acrobat documents allow access to corporate information, regardless of the source language.

Yes, Amikai is actively working on expanding and improving its offerings in Asian languages other than Japanese, e.g., Korean and Simplified Chinese.

At Amikai, we are very excited about the launch of the Amikai Enterprise translation solution, and we are eagerly watching its adoption in international corporations.

MT is a technology just now coming into its own commercially. Like any tool, MT has appropriate uses and inappropriate uses, and at Amikai, we believe that as users develop a better sense for the usefulness of MT, more and better commercial applications will be developed. There is still room for great advances in quality, but in addition, engines will need to expand beyond the current sentential unit to consider longer contexts when performing translations. In addition, we believe that there is much untapped potential in the types of MT applications that are available, including ones that better integrate MT and HT. All in all, Amikai is excited to be at the cutting edge of MT applications, and we see a bright future for this technology.