Keywords Studios : acquires KantanMT, a cutting-edge machine translation provider

Keywords Studios, the international technical and creative services provider to the global video games industry, today announces that it has acquired KantanMT, a leading-edge machine translation technology company.

The acquisition will enable Keywords to provide a world-class machine learning localization service.

KantanMT is a leading developer of automated translation technology with its own suite of Neural Network Machine translation engines.

In addition, KantanMT will shortly launch its global translation platform, KantanSkynet, which combines the efficiency of machine translation with crowd sourced post-editing to ensure the highest quality output.

Development services

KantanMT currently provides its cutting-edge technology and development services to large organisations such as eBay, VistaPrint and the European Commission.

KantanMT was founded by Tony O'Dowd, a pioneer in the development of Machine Translation and Translation Memory solutions. Leveraging a combination of academic research interests and latest technology developments, Tony has a proven track record of delivering successful commercial localization applications.

KantanMT is based at Dublin City University's ADAPT Centre in Ireland, a leading research institute in the field of machine translation.

Andrew Day, CEO of Keywords Studios commented: 'We have already been working with Kantan, which we previously selected as a commercial partner to underpin our machine translation initiatives in games, as its solutions are uniquely adaptable to the challenges of applying machine translation to video games.

'Video games are highly context specific, often being set in fantasy worlds, are highly immersive, and therefore require both high quality and highly adapted localization, are multi branching and use real time, AI generated content.

'Kantan brings its highly customisable technology, its exciting crowd sourced translation platform, and the deep expertise of Tony O'Dowd and his team. This, combined with Keywords' 20 years of games localization experience and video game translators around the world will enable us to provide a fully integrated world leading machine-assisted localization service to leading video game publishers and developers, further cementing our market leading position.

Using a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use cloud-based platform, KantanMT clients can deliver automated translation solutions, supporting over 100+ language combinations.

Automated translation solutions

KantanSkynet is a complementary post-editing platform, powered by a global community of professional translators.

KantanSkynet uses AI to determine the quality of translated texts and automatically routes low quality texts to professional translators for improvements. These are then used to continuously improve future machine translated content.

KantanMT was founded in 2012 and hosts 3,500+ machine translation engines and 1.3 trillion words of training data on behalf of its clients.