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From international travel to global work emails, we have your back whenever you need translation. Introducing Papago, a service that has come to represent translation, so much so that the phrase “Papago it” has become synonymous with “translate it.” In May 2023, the Papago app’s MAU* surpassed 10 million, making it a service used by one in five South Koreans.

*MAU (Monthly Active Users): A metric that indicates the pure number of users who used a service during a month.

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Papago, also used by users outside of Korea

We have 10 million monthly active users on the Papago app and nearly 18 million on PC and mobile web combined (as of December 2023), many of whom are international users from Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. They use Papago for maps and restaurant menus while traveling in Korea, and also actively use it to translate Hallyu (K-Wave) content and learn Korean outside of Korea. What is the secret behind Papago’s ability to capture the hearts and minds of both local and global users?

A sophisticated technology that translates even the minds of users

"Papago is improving its technology by listening to users' stories and examining the service’s usability."

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Papago is a service that we jointly create with Papago users, in that we listen to our users and find out what they want to improve, rather than just following the biggest technology trends.

When traveling abroad, we often find ourselves in situations where we want to understand a restaurant menu or sign, but cannot even type the foreign texts. Recognizing this inconvenience, Papago developed “Instant Image Translation,” which translates text in images when you take a photo with the app, and “AR Real-time Translation,” which translates text on the camera screen even before you take a picture.

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Papago’s impressive translation results were achieved by combining HTS technology*, which analyzes the character design and sentence structure in an image and translates it into the most suitable configuration, and text inpainting technology*, which synthesizes the translation results while maintaining the original character size and position.

*Hierarchical Text Structuring (HTS): Papago's proprietary deep learning technology that analyzes the design and sentence structure of text recognized in images and reconstructs it into sentences and paragraphs optimized for translation.

*Text inpainting technology: An instant image translation technology. A “text rendering” feature that synthesizes translated text into images. A paper on the technologies was published at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2022. More details can be found in DEVIEW 2023.

Internet slangs? No problem! Papago’s “transcendental translation”​

Did you know that Papago translates even the latest internet slang such as “띵작” and “머한민국” (both slang utilize the characters’ resemblance to the intended words “명작,” meaning masterpiece, and “대한민국,” meaning the Republic of Korea)? No matter how much data we accumulate, language is always evolving and being reborn. That is why Papago is not only capable of translating newly coined terms, but also learning the sentences provided by users and quickly picking up new words and information so it can translate entire sentences true to the context.

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We go the extra mile by working with country-specific linguists to ensure that our translations are tailored to the language and culture of each country. It is the secret to Papago's high-quality translations that have garnered a reputation for transcendental translation.

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* Transcendental translation: a translation that is considered to have effectively expressed the feel and tone of the original text more than a simple, word-to-word translation

"Papago believes that a good translation is one that fully reflects the expressions, mindset, and culture-specific to each country."

For everyone who needs translation, whenever they need it

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Papago is widely loved across borders and across all age groups, from teenagers to people over 60. “How do I read this?” From a friendly language teacher for a child asking a question to a real-time interpreter for parents traveling abroad, Papago aims to be the translation service that is always there when you need it. Stay tuned as we evolve Papago even further with accumulated experience and skilled technology ●