The University of Edinburgh has joined forces with Japan’s Advanced Telecommunications Research Insti-tute International to develop a translation system for the Japanese national telephone network. The system will be designed to monitor spoken conversations on the display, and provide callers of both nationalities with an immediate, computer-generated interpretation. The project team will be supervised in the UK by the director of the University’s Centre for Speech Technology, Professor John Laver, and will include Japanese personnel from the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute. Initial research will focus on the development of a database containing English and Japanese speech sounds or phonemes, which can then be adapted to phonemes identified during a telephone conversation.
