Major South Korean tech firms have recently rolled out a number of automated translation applications for Korean and major foreign languages, industry officials and analysts said Thursday.

Co-developed by local software firm Hancom Interfree Inc., and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, "Genie Talk" is capable of translating Korean, Japanese, English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Russian and Arabic.


The app will be available to athletes during the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games, they said, allowing athletes and sports officials to communicate freely with each other.

The mobile app is compatible with both Apple Inc.'s iPhones and Samsung Electronics' Android-based mobile devices.

The app can also translate speech, copied letters and even sentences or words from an image.

Hancom said Genie Talk can recognize 270,000 Korean words and 65,000 English words. 

Earlier this week, the country's largest Internet portal Naver Corp. launched a new automated translation app in four languages -- Korean, Japanese, Chinese and English.

The app, which can operate with or without an Internet connection, translates text, speech, and even words and phrases from an image by using artificial intelligence software developed by the portal firm.

Naver said the app, currently only available on the Android operating system, will be compatible with an Apple handset in September.

Samsung Electronics Co., the world's largest maker of smartphones, has also added a translation feature to its new Galaxy Note phablet that will be released in the local market later this month. 

Users can translate sentences in multiple languages by hovering over text with an S-pen, Samsung said.

The translation feature also works for images, pictures and Internet articles, the company said. (Yonhap)