January 22nd, Dublin, Ireland: KantanMT has announced that its Software Development Kit (SDK) has been enhanced by the addition of a new Asynchronous Interface. This development in the SDK will provide a high speed, high volume asynchronous programme interface in to both Statistical and Neural MT engines.

The synchronous and asynchronous nature of an Application Programming Interface (API) is a function of the time it takes from the initial request for a service to the return of processed data. In the case of synchronous APIs, the expectation is that there will be an immediate return of processed data. The API requests data and then pauses and waits for the processed data to be returned. This has the impact of tying up that hardware whilst it awaits a result to its request.

In the case of asynchronous APIs, it proceeds to send data on the basis that a resource may not be immediately available, and therefore, the requested service may not be immediately responded to. The API will receive a call back when the required service is available. The asynchronous method avoids the server pausing and lying dormant while it awaits a response, thus allowing that server to be employed in other tasks.

Asynchronous processing is used in the case where the user doesn’t want to halt processing while an external request is being processed. Whereas a synchronous API will block the caller until it returns, thus tying up resources until the action has been completed. On the other hand, an asynchronous API will not block the caller and typically will require a call back which will be executed once the work is completed. Asynchronous requests are useful in maintaining functionality in an application rather than tie up application resources waiting on a request.

“We have introduced the asynchronous API function so that our community of users can reduce spending on the need for multiple servers. The synchronous function results in costly computational power being tied up and unavailable while the server waits for a service to be delivered. The asynchronous API avoids this bottleneck,” said Tony O’Dowd, CEO and Chief Architect at KantanMT.

This will be very helpful to clients who require high volume translations, but not in real-time. The Asynchronous interface will queue translation requests and process them when compute capacity is available. This avoids the necessity to scale up compute volume, reducing costs and keeping TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) to a minimum for the KantanMT Community.

 About KantanMT

KantanMT.com is the leading SaaS-based machine translation platform that enables users to develop and manage customized machine translation engines in the cloud. The innovative technologies offered on the KantanMT.com platform enable users to easily build MT engines in over 750 language combinations; engines that will seamlessly integrate into the user’s localization workflows and web applications.

KantanMT is based in the INVENT Building, DCU Campus, Dublin 9, Ireland.