Metaverse Hub, which supports fostering metaverse companies, training talent, and content testing and demonstration, opened in May. In order to create a leading foundation for the hyper-connected and ultra-realistic Metaverse new industry, the Ministry of Science and ICT reorganized the ICT-Culture Convergence Center located in Pangyo 2nd Techno Valley, Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi-do into a Metaverse Hub. This paper met with Jeon Hae-yong, CEO of "Idea Concert," a company that resides in Metaverse Hub, and conducted an interview on the background of its growth.
Q. What kind of company is the Idea Concert?
A. Idea Concert is a company specializing in cultural technology development that develops technologies that can create, utilize, and promote content well. The first authoring tool created by the Idea Concert is Toonibi, which makes webtoons into videos, and is preparing to launch a authoring tool that can automatically create 100% webtoons next year. The second project was Toontra, a translation authoring tool that can translate webtoons. It is currently working on upgrading its last technology and is scheduled to open in the first half of next year.
Q. What made you develop a webtoon translation authoring tool?
A. Idea Concert is not a company that specializes in webtoons, but a company that makes webtoons into videos, but exports more webtoon videos overseas than domestic. However, as it was exported overseas, there were quite a few issues of translation. In addition, when translating webtoons, there are speech balloons due to the nature of the content, and there were many tasks that required humans to manually bring text from speech balloons, translate them, and put the translated text back into speech balloons. I wanted to find a way to do these easily, so I developed them.
Q. What is the main function of Toontra?
A. Toontra is the work of extracting text from speech balloons, a characteristic of webtoons, and the translation itself is important, but it is a big feature that the translated text can be processed at once through Toontra. In addition, there is a technology that translates with artificial intelligence, which is the first translation in the basic dictionary meaning of the text, and foreigners with grades 5 to 6 or higher of the Korean Language Proficiency Test see the text, reinterpret and modify it to fit the webtoon. Toontra's unique feature is that artificial intelligence and humans can translate together to make it more accurate and faster.
Q. What's your plan to release Toontra?
A. Toontra, a webtoon translation authoring tool, is scheduled to open in April 2022. It will be released overseas rather than in Korea, and the first service will be targeted at Indonesia and Brazil. The reason for choosing Indonesia and Brazil was that Indonesian and Brazilian people liked Western and Japanese cartoons a lot, but since three years ago, they have become very fond of Korean webtoons and their population is increasing exponentially. As soon as the Korean webtoon is released through Toontra, it plans to provide services so that the people can see Korean webtoons immediately in Indonesian and Brazilian.
Electronic Times Internet Reporter Eunjung Judy Yu(judy6956@etnews.com)