Asia Online – the world’s most significant literacy project (and internet investment opportunity)

Due to the complexities of the Thai language solving Thai translation was an ideal first task, as it makes translation to other Asian languages very simple. Thai has no punctuation, no spaces between words, no end-of-sentence markers, no upper and lower case, no tense, gender or subject, and that’s just for starters as it is alphabet-based not character-based as is Chinese.

Throw in the relatively inexpensive costs of operating in Thailand and the availability (and loyalty) of a pool of talented computational linguists from several Bangkok-based Universities, and Bangkok was an ideal base for the company.

“Thailand has a unique aspect to it that no other country in the world has for languages”, says Wiggins. “To start with, you have Thai, but there are also huge Chinese, Japanese Korean and Indian industries – the core languages of Asia are all covered here.

“Then you look at Thailand’s neighbours, and you then see that Malaysia is covered here, Arabic in the south, and there’s a sizeable population here from both Indonesia and the Philippines and hence you can draw on people who are fluent in both languages.

“Then you have all the tourism that Thailand attracts, so you have a lot of people in Thailand who are fluent in French and German and Spanish and the Scandinavian languages.”

By sourcing specific skills online, Asia Online has found it has “a huge pool of people who have PhDs and Masters degrees and are ideally qualified for this translation work in specific areas”, says Wiggins.

“There is no other country in the world where such a linguistic talent base is not only readily available, but very affordable.”

The importance of knowledge

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