NC Ranks First in Domain-Specific Translation at Global AI Translation Competition

Participating with a Self-Developed AI Language Model

Exterior view of NCSoft Pangyo R&D Center building. Photo by NCSoft

NCSoft announced on the 22nd that it won first place at the AI translation competition ‘WMT23 (Workshop on Machine Translation 2023)’ recently held in Singapore.

WMT23 is a global AI translation competition. This year, it took place in Singapore from December 6 to 7.

NCSoft achieved first place in the domain-specialized translation category with its own AI translation service, ‘VARCO MT (Machine Translation)’. VARCO MT received high scores in translation quality, success rate of specialized terminology translation, and consistency in terminology usage.

‘Domain-specialized translation,’ which covers professional fields such as gaming, medical, and manufacturing, requires maintaining the context and consistency of specialized terms during the translation process. VARCO MT applied a technique that combines existing AI translation models with domain-specific knowledge in real time during decoding. It stably integrated industry-specific terminology without pre-training while maintaining excellent translation quality.

At this competition, NCSoft demonstrated technology for translating Chinese to English rather than Korean. It was explained that this proved world-class competitiveness based on the technology and service know-how applied to real-time chat translation in its games.

The VARCO MT technology submitted to this competition is currently being used in NCSoft’s global game services for ‘live chat translation’ and ‘global internal work support.’ NCSoft plans to consider expanding the application of its translation technology to domains beyond gaming through further advancement.