AILingGo CEO Lee Jai-wook speaks to The Korea Times in Samseong-dong, Gangnam District, Seoul, Nov. 19. Courtesy of AILingGo

With various artificial intelligence (AI) agents assisting in our daily work, one of the most frequently used services is translation or interpretation, especially when working on official documents that require precision and a thorough understanding of terminology specific to the relevant fields.

Former engineer and U.S. Attorney Lee Jai-wook is among those who best understand the importance of precision and understanding of terminology in translations for specialized areas. Recognizing the growth potential of the legal translation market, he founded AILingGo in 2020, a company that offers an AI-powered legal translation platform. It is now aggressively expanding its client base to include top law firms and government agencies and preparing services for customers requiring translations in languages other than English.

“When we use generative AI in the market for specialized areas, one of the major issues we face is hallucination, in which the model produces incorrect information, or makes up completely fabricated information,” Lee said during an interview with The Korea Times.

“That is mostly because there isn't sufficient data for those models to learn about the specialized fields. Generative AI is powered by large-scale language models, which are based on learnings from general data. This means that there is not enough data for the models to learn about domain-specific languages, forcing the AI to fabricate answers.”

Screen capture of AILingGo's translation platform OTran

Lee said this is why he came up with the idea of launching OTran, AILingGo's flagship platform specializing in the AI translation of legal documents for corporate clients. It is powered by an engine from renowned machine translation company SYSTRAN, and provides language models catered to different clients.

AILingGo's clients now include three out of Korea's top six law firms and the Korea Legislation Research Institute, a government-funded legislation research group that provides most of the English-language data and resources on Korea's laws. Various law firms and government organizations, including the National Assembly and the Constitutional Court are also now testing OTran as their AI tool for translation, while a number of corporate clients are also showing interest in AILingGo's service.

Lee said OTran distinguishes itself from other AI translators in the market because it specializes in terminologies and languages used in legal and business fields.

“Take the word ‘facility' as an example,” Lee said. “Generally, it refers to equipment serving a particular purpose, but in the context of tax and accounting, it has a completely different meaning, akin to a loan. On the other hand, if a translator for the general public translates ‘facility' into ‘loan,' it would be inappropriate for those audiences.”

“In other words, if a doctor tries to communicate with a lawyer by using doctors' language, there won't be smooth communication, because the doctor is speaking based on terminologies and knowledge shared among doctors. This is why we believe in the importance of a domain-specific approach in AI translation.”

A comparison between the source file of a standard form Confidentiality Agreement by Korea's Fair Trade Commission, left, and a translated version generated by OTran. Korea Times photo by Nam Hyun-woo

As Lee said, OTran offers a number of translation models for users to select depending on the type of documents.

When users upload source text files and choose specialized translation models, such as those tailored for legal documents or business contracts, the AI generates the translated text in just seconds and then provides an editing interface where users can review the text and make adjustments, including switching between honorific and plain language styles, simply by clicking mode switches.

After the edits are complete, the platform generates a finalized document that maintains the same format as the original file. During the interview, Lee demonstrated the translation process of a four-page standard form of a Confidentiality Agreement provided by Korea's Fair Trade Commission, and it took less than five seconds to create a draft version, which only required detailed adjustments to the tone, and took less than five minutes to complete a translated version in the original format.

Since OTran is a service targeting corporate clients, Lee said the company made extra effort in enhancing security, by separating data uploaded by different clients and encrypting them.

“OTran ensures that only the clients who own the data can access and use it,” Lee said. “All data uploaded on OTran is stored separately for each client in an encrypted state, so even our engineers cannot view it. The AI model for client A does not communicate with client B to prevent any mixture of confidential data.”

According to Lee, AILingGois currently in the early stages of fundraising, with several investors expressing interest in the company's growth potential. When those investments are secured, Lee said the company will begin adding languages other than English and Korean into the platform starting next year.

“We believe our future lies in the global market,” Lee said. “The global legal market is valued at around $900 billion, while that of Korea is approximately $5.5 billion. This indicates that our focus should not be confined to Korean-English translation. To my knowledge, there are few domain-specific AI translation services available in the global market. Once we expand our language offerings, we expect the market will grow exponentially.”

AILingGo CEO Lee Jai-wook, right, demonstrates the translation process of an article during an interview with The Korea Times at his office in Samseong-dong, Gangnam District, Seoul, Nov. 19. Korea Times photo by Nam Hyun-woo

While serving as AILingGo's CEO, Lee is also counsel for Yulchon, one of the top six law firms in Korea. He came up with the idea of AI translation while working on an AI-related consulting project for one of Korea's top information technology (IT) service companies. This led to discussions with the company about developing it into an actual business.

Lee said the discussion did not evolve into a joint venture with the company, and he independently established AILingGo without investments from Yulchon or the IT company. However, Lee's counterparts at the IT company showed strong interest in his idea and later joined AILingGo as engineers.

“The demand for AI translation will grow continuously, given the time and resources required for human translations,” Lee said.

“Though I am doing this business, I also agree that it is still risky to use AI-generated translations as the final outcome without a reviewing process. A human review is absolutely necessary. Using AI translation will help you finish a task that would originally take two hours in just 10 minutes. This means AI translation is a tool that will dramatically improve the efficiency of human translators.”