Global Business Support... Wavve's 'Lowering Language Barriers' Project

[Asia Economy Reporter Lim Hye-seon] Online video service (OTT) Wave is partnering with content, artificial intelligence (AI), and translation specialist companies to develop a platform for the global expansion of K-content.

The goal is to support the global media business by reducing existing translation and subtitle production costs, shortening production time, and lowering language barriers.

On the 15th, it announced that it will promote the "Automatic Subtitle Production and Editing Technology Development Project for Spoken Broadcast Content" through the WaveSMS consortium. The consortium has been selected for the Ministry of Science and ICT's Information and Communication Broadcasting Technology Development Project and has embarked on a technology development project to be carried out until 2024.

The consortium includes five specialized companies: Korea's leading OTT Wave, AI specialist company TwigFarm as the lead, SBS, global machine translation specialist company Systran, and media localization specialist company Purumodity.

The consortium plans to build a VOD pilot service capable of real-time localization of K-content, aiming to support the enhancement of global competitiveness of domestic media companies.

Although domestic content companies possess excellent content, they have faced limitations in global expansion due to the high localization cost of $11 per minute. When using machine translation to shorten this, problems arise such as reduced subtitle quality because it is difficult to reflect multi-party conversations or spoken context. Another challenge is that translation patterns must vary according to the characteristics of genres such as dramas, entertainment, and documentaries.

Accordingly, the Wave consortium plans to develop various service models and tools to reduce localization costs and improve productivity, including ▲a Korean speech recognizer dedicated to content ▲a genre-based context-aware machine translator ▲and cloud subtitle editing tools.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.