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

Many parts of Asia have been excluded from the digital revolution, since the people are not familiar with English, Japanese, Chinese or other major ‘tier 1’ languages that dominate web content. This failure to understand has severely limited the impact of the ICT revolution in most emerging economies.

As we repeatedly write on Gizmag, education is the only sure fire answer to the world’s problems. Education is the engine of productivity and progress. It underpins economic growth, improved social conditions, and development prospects. Providing richer and more compelling content and free access to information is essential to improving education in Asia. Hence Asia Online is the world’s largest literacy project and is currently in the process of translating tens of millions of educational, political, scientific, engineering and entertainment articles into Asian languages and making the content available through the Asia Online portal.

The goal is to put Asian countries on an equal information access footing to the rest of the world through education. Starting with the Thai-Language Portal, Asia Online is creating millions of articles covering education, politics, science, engineering, entertainment and more.

The company is translating the most important of the 1.6 million sites that have English language Open Document License (ODL) content – this represents more than 100 million pages available for translation, of which tens of millions of pages are initially slated for availability in Thai, and to a further ten markets within two years.

The best known ODL content is Wikipedia, the website with the seventh highest visitor count globally – other forms of free and licensed commercial content will also be included. The aim is to use the content to attract visitors who will generate further content through Web 2.0 features and drive online advertising revenues.

Understandably, access to the likes of Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook and the curriculums from several leading Western universities will have an enormously positive impact on the economic and social development of the developing economies of Asia. Understanding and knowledge will reduce poverty, unleash the creative forces within the population, increase workforce productivity and create the foundations for a knowledge-based society. It is expected that the company will receive assistance from “crowd sourced” local language populations to find and correct translation errors, due to a desire to improve local language knowledge pool, perhaps even as a national initiative in some countries.

Wiggins was at pains to point out that although Asia Online has financial goals and is a commercial operation, the management team is driven by the desire to make a positive contribution to the development of emerging nations across Asia.

How Asia Online’s translation technology platform works

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