Naver expands Papago with Arabic translation, boosting global reach

South Korea's leading online portal Naver Corp. announced on Friday the addition of Arabic translation capabilities to its AI-driven translation service Papago, marking a significant step in broadening its linguistic capabilities and enhancing its global competitiveness.

Papago now supports Arabic for text, voice and conversational translations, with plans to extend these capabilities to image translation later in the year.

This update, which also incorporates the right-to-left (RTL) writing system of Arabic into the user interface (UI), increases the total number of languages available on Papago to 16.

"Arabic is one of the six official languages of the United Nations and is extensively used across various global sectors, including diplomacy. This update is expected to significantly enhance Papago's competitiveness on the international stage," said Director of Naver Cloud, Shin Jung-hwi.

According to Naver, Papago's global monthly active users (MAU) have reached 18.9 million, of which about 5.1 million are international users, representing a 25% increase from the previous year.

Write to Ji-Eun Jeong at jeong@hankyung.com