Naver officially launched its translation app papago on Wednesday, about a year after trial service began.
Several auto-translate apps are competing for the market, with Google, Microsoft and Baidu in the lead.
Papago is a "neural machine," i.e. capable of learning from mistakes and user input. Naver claims it can translate five or six newspaper articles or one thesis at a time, rivaling Google Translate.
It can only handle English, Chinese, Japanese, French and Spanish, though the lineup of languages will expand to Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian and the Taiwan’s Hokkien dialect soon. At the moment the app is free.
Initially only available as a smartphone app, it will also be accessible on PCs.
Kim Jun-seok, who headed the development, said, "At present, papago gets 60 out of 100 points for translation. Our goal is to raise the score to 80 within two to three years."
