"Japan gives reputation to the scientist"

[Taro Toporific]

[Mulboyne]

Yomiuri: Cyber-Babel system nearing completion
A government-sponsored project to develop a multilingual audio-text translation system is likely to be completed during fiscal 2005, raising expectations of the ability to communicate in four languages using cell phones or personal digital assistants, government sources said Thursday. The system would consist of a database of 500,000 phrases, or 5 million words, in Japanese, Chinese, English, and Korean, which would be accessed via cell phones or PDAs. Text or audio translations would be available. For instance, one could speak in Japanese into a phone connected to the system and the listener would hear the translation in the chosen language.
Current translation systems have much smaller vocabularies and limited voice-recognition ability, and are limited to recognizing and translating only the most commonly used greetings or phrases. The goverment's IT Strategy Council, as well as the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry, have been developing the system since 2003. The development, which has been entrusted to the private sector, is near completion and the ministry will start testing it around spring, the sources said. When there arises a prospect of practical application, the government will transfer the technology to the private sector to further its penetration among members of the public.

[Taro Toporific]

Yomiuri: Cyber-Babel system nearing completion.

They got the "babel" right for their their Cyber-Babel system.

They've announced this every year for the past twenty so maybe it's true, hee, hee.
Taro Disclaimer: The more machine translation is used... the more money I make offering documentation management (aka editing) services.