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hello and welcome to japan weekly from n_h_k_ news your day by day review of
the week in Japan.
I'm Karuna Shinsho in Tokyo. Coming up in our show,
and communication barriers are coming down as a new kind of translator helps
you overcome your fears of speaking a foreign language.
Well speaking a foreign language may come easy to some, but for others it can
be a frustrating experience.
but Japanese Researchers are working on a computer device that could do away
with the stress and difficulty of speaking a language that's not too
familiar.
/anoo shukuhaku no yoyaku wo onegai shitain desu ga/
I'd like to make a reservation for a room
/kashikomarimashita. /
/nanmeisama de,/
/itsu no gokibou deshouka?/
alright how many people and when would you like
/ja shouganai desune./
/ja ichimann nanasenn yen no heya ni shimasu/
The new interpreter is able to translate colloquial japanese expressions
such as /ja/, which roughly means then, and /ano/,
said when you want to get someone's attention, into proper English.
The device was developed by a research institute founded by the post and
telecommunications ministry along with business circles from Kyoto city and its
environs.
the institute has spent twelve years developing a device for communicating
via telephone in Japanese and English without language barriers
This is the interpretation system previously developed by the institute.
/eetto, yoyaku onegai shimasu/
The old system was unable to interpret interjection such as, well.
It was also unable to translate japanese into the english-language sentence
structure and would misinterpret the common usage of postpositional words
functioning as auxiliaries.
The old device analyzed sentences according to grammatical structure. When a
sentence was grammatically incorrect or incomplete it didn't know how to handle
it
in contrast the new device uses the idea of partial translation. It divides a
sentence into several sections and translates each part in the order in
which it is spoken.
for example when a computer translates /juuji no shinkansen/ which means the ten
o'clock bullet train, it has difficulty putting the japanese particle /no/ into
english. this is because /no/ can mean at, on, for, or numerous other prepositions
or even the possessive.
The new device has more than a thousand Japanese phrases in its memory banks of
of two nouns with the particle /no/ in-between and their translations
it takes a computer less than a second to choose the appropriate english phrase
/tatoeba hoteru no yoyaku dearu toka/
/resutoran de .../
we believe that in the near future the interpreter will be able to handle
complete simple conversations,
such as making hotel reservations or ordering a restaurant.
It may take more time however for it to be able to interpret business meetings
still we're looking forward to bringing the device to that level by the
year two thousand ten
/doryoku shitai to omotteimasu/
from december tenth to
december thirteenth
Researchers are now working to make the device useful
for translating not only hotel reservations but airline bookings and
tourist information as well
in the not-too-distant future japanese people will be able to use this new
system to make conversing with foreigners much easier
/... koto ga dekimasu/