JTEC panel report on machine translation in Japan

The goal of this report is to provide an overview of the state of the art of machine translation (MT) in Japan and to provide a comparison between Japanese and Western technology in this area. The term 'machine translation' as used here, includes both the science and technology required for automating the translation of text from one human language to another. Machine translation is viewed in Japan as an important strategic technology that is expected to play a key role in Japan's increasing participation in the world economy. MT is seen in Japan as important both for assimilating information into Japanese as well as for disseminating Japanese information throughout the world. Most of the MT systems now available in Japan are transfer-based systems. The majority of them exploit a case-frame representation of the source text as the basis of the transfer process. There is a gradual movement toward the use of deeper semantic representations, and some groups are beginning to look at interlingua-based systems

The role of theme and information

Our understanding of text contributes to our grasp of the principles of translation, and translation, in turn, can be a powerful tool for elucidating the nature of text. Translation, if it is to capture the full meaning of a text, must take into account every thread of implication, with its relative weight understood both within the message itself and, beyond that, against the backdrop of the entire tapestry of communicative systems in the source language. And then, once all the nuances have been grasped, each shading of the message must thereupon be recaptured in a totally different set of systems with all proportions kept. So daunting indeed is this task that translation has been called “probably the most complex type of event yet produced in the evolution of the cosmos” (Richards 1953:250)