Norwegian firm Pock Mobile has chosen Thailand as the first country in which to launch an SMS translation service, initially targeting 3 million tourists from 12 countries who visit Thailand every year and want to communicate with their hosts.

Pock Mobile (Thailand) director Pal Myrvold said that after Thailand, the company planned to launch the service in Russia, China, Europe and several Arabic-speaking countries. It hopes to achieve a "global reach" by the end of 2008.

Pock Mobile has developed a platform called PockTranslate, which handles instantaneous, machine-generated translations via SMS messaging. To enable translation from English to Thai, the firm has signed a contract to use an application developed by Thailand's National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec), the only provider of machine-translation software in the country.

To use the service, English speakers must write "eng tha", leave a space, then write a sentence for translation. It must then be sent to a number set up by Pock Mobile in their home countries. The PockTranslate system will return the sentence to the sender, translated into "Karaoke Thai", or Thai transliterated into the Latin alphabet and able to be read to a Thai speaker.

If Thai listeners are still unable to understand, an English speaker can add a Thai mobile number after the original message and send it to the PockTranslate number. The message will then be translated into Thai and sent to the nominated number; in the Thai's handset, the message will be displayed in Thai.

Myrvold said tourists would need to use Thai-SIM mobile phones to read the Thai alphabet, because foreign mobiles would not support the Thai alphabet. Thai mobile-phone subscribers who allow PockTranslate customers to use their numbers to facilitate translations will be paid Bt4 for each message received from the company. PockTranslate calls these people "Pock Friends".

"By using Pock Friends we will also benefit from word of mouth," said Myrvold.

The idea has taken four years to develop and was delayed for about a year by the tsunami.

Myrvold, 51, a Norwegian, has a background in advertising and conceptual creation. He has worked with such agencies as Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising and Euro RSG, with clients like British Airways, NCR, Barclays Bank and Mitsubishi.

He said Pock Mobile chose Thailand as the first country to introduce the service partly because of the difficulty of the Thai language and the country's large number of tourist arrivals.

"We have to start with a country anyway", he said.

In a survey, the company discovered that 80 per cent of tourists brought their mobile phones with them to use while visiting Thailand, and only a small number bought a Thai SIM card for use during the trip, because that required registration with passport numbers.

He said the company expected that within a year, 30 per cent of tourists from countries of origin selected by Pock Mobile would be using the service.

At present, the service is offered to tourists from 12 countries: Australia, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Sweden and Switzerland. Together, they represent a travel market of close to 3 million inbound tourists a year.

"Within one year, we expect 1 million tourists from these countries to be using the service once or twice during their stay here," he said.

Pock Mobile's revenues will come mainly from SMS traffic. The cost of the service is about half a euro (Bt23) but varies from country to country, due to different payment systems and classes of SMS content delivery. Additional revenues will be generated from other services related to mobile content, such as translation through MMS messaging, and through the website www.pockranslate.com, under a programme yet to be announced.

Thepchai Supnithi, head of Nectec's Text Processing Group, said the agency had leased its ParSit software to Pock Mobile, enabling it to launch the SMS translation service. Under the one-year contract, the Norwegian firm will pay Bt600,000 for the lease and another Bt300,000 for translation and maintenance services.

Currently, ParSit is only capable of English-to-Thai translation, but next year it is expected to be capable of translating Thai to English, he said. The software was developed by Nectec with assistance from NEC in Japan.

Myrvold said that at present, it takes about 16 seconds for a message to be translated and returned to its Pock Mobile customer, but the company is working with Nectec to reduce turn-round to 10 seconds.

To date, The firm has invested Bt20 million to launch the service in Thailand.

It is also mobilising what it calls its "Pock Army" of women who will promote the service among tourists in Bangkok, Phuket and other major tourist destinations.

Pichaya Changsorn

The Nation