Geoname translator for maps

Project background Recent technological advancements in machine translation (MT) sector have resulted in development of translation theory with minimal errors and grammatical consistency, which has considerably broadened the scope for MT. Cost-effective and rapid conversion of documents in regional languages has spurred industry growth over the past few years. Need for organizations to localize their content in several languages to capture international markets is expected to bolster demand for MT systems in the near future. Companies are striving towards meeting customer demands and needs outside their local market. Localization enables them to communicate with the target markets in their native language, integrate industry-specific aspects with their culture and develop a local appeal. Currently available machine translation tools are strong at translating text, when it is needed to be done between languages considered dominant in the translation market. For example, English, German, French and Spanish are most spoken languages in Europe, which make them more appealing to machine translation companies compared to regional languages, that offer much lower market potential. Europe consists of 24 official languages where most of them are regional languages. Companies, that are operating in these regions, are in a disadvantage when it comes to providing their services and products to foreign markets. This problem is highly noticeable when it comes to translating geographical names. As the translation of geographic names requires specific knowledge and experience, the costs of manual translation costs are high. In addition to translation, also the replacement of the names on maps or in text is done manually, making it another time and money consuming task. Cross border nature Both project partners are facing the same problem, when it comes to translating geographical names. As Estonian and Latvian are both small and niche languages, the large machine translation companies will not focus on development of suitable tools. In addition to benefits received from shared know-how and expertise, the partnership of two companies located in different countries will make the automated translation solution more adaptive and easily transferable to other languages, enabling it to reach a wider range of potential customers. Both partners have specific intellectual capacity and human resources, that are required for successfully developing an automated translation solution. By combining human resources with their unique intellectual capacity from both companies, it is possible to create an automated translation solution which would be more cost effective to develop. Project objective The objective of the project is to develop and implement an automated online machine-translation and substitution solution that will focus on translating geographical names. The developed solution will consist of a tool which will be used by the project partners for translation of their own products as well as be offered as an internet service to third parties who require translation of graphical files consisting of geographic names. Main activities of the project are: Gaining a clear overview on the business needs of the target groups and the available business opportunities, including a comprehensive analysis of available data sources, that will be used by the automated translation solution and develop the design of system architecture; Developing the automated translation solution and creating a user-friendly web portal that will provide the automated translation solution as a service to the potential customers; Establish a marketing campaign that will be used to reach the target groups.

The objective of the project was to develop and implement an automated online machine-translation and substitution solution that will focus on translating geographical names. The developed solution consists of a tool that will be used by the project partners for translation of their own products and offered as an internet service to third parties who require translation of graphical files consisting of geographic names. Main activities were: Gaining a clear overview on the business needs of the target groups and the available business opportunities, including a comprehensive analysis of available data sources, that will be used by the automated translation solution and develop the design of system architecture; Developing the automated translation solution and creating a user-friendly web portal that will provide the automated translation solution as a service to the potential customers; Establish a marketing campaign that will be used to reach the target groups. The outcome of the project - TerraLexicon translation solution - fills a real gap in the geographic solution market for companies which are preparing cartographic products for export, as shown by the continuous interest from enterprises, starting from Frankfurt book fair 2019 and ending with workshops. The project has also improved the cross-border business networks, with stronger cooperation between Jāņa sēta and Regio as an outcome of the joint development of the solution, where the combined know-how of each company served to bring a more durable project outcome.

The project will contribute directly to the programme result indicator as the two project partners will develop jointly a new product/service. The main target of the project planned by Jāņa sēta and Regio is to use the combined human resources and experience for the development of automated translation solution thus promote cross-border cooperation in EST-LAT territory. Focused cooperation in the project between Karšu izdevniecība Jāņa sēta and Regio will strengthen mutual business relations and share of information, knowledge and competence, and as a result eliminate language localization barriers by developing automated translation solution to overcome the small language specifics and allow for cost reduction of niche markets across the EU.