Mitsubishi Electric has developed a machine translation system, Meltran, designed to run on the PSI artificial intelligence personal computer that was one of the forerunner products of the Japanese Fifth Generation Project: Metran is described as a high performance, flexible system using Prolog for the meaning analysis programs and the dictionary database; in contrast to machine translation programs written in C and PL/I, it is claimed that use of Prolog means that the programs can be modified by the user, who can also add to the database – but until next month, when the PSI computer becomes available, there is no hardware on which to run the Meltran system, which Mitsubishi hopes will give it an edge over Fujitsu, Hitachi and NEC, all offering mainframe machine translation systems.
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