March 6th, 2023. AI natural language processing company TWIGFARM announced that they have signed a contract with content platform company KIDARI STUDIO to provide a webtoon-exclusive translation engine.
Existing text-based translation engines have been criticized for being unsuitable when localizing webtoons, where much of it compromised of spoken language. In addition, the text-based translation engines were not suitable with webtoons due to high proportion of images.
The webtoon-exclusive translation engine developed by TWIGFARM is based on multi-modal learning, which uses various information, including images, as training data. This means, that it can extract information from webtoon images to achieve more accurate and natural high-quality translations.
TWIGFARM is also conducting research and development projects for the localization of digital content. Selected as government agency in April of 2022, they were awarded with ‘Information and Communication Broadcasting Technology Development Project’ and are currently working on the "Development of Automatic Captioning and Editing Technology for Spoken Language Broadcasting Content" project, which will be ongoing until next year.
In addition, they are developing various products and services to support content localization. Sun-ho Baek, the CEO of TWIGFARM said “The company aims to contribute towards the growth and development of the domestic content ecosystem and further propel the global expansion of K-content.