As the Internet takes off in Japan and becomes a feature of news programs and (almost) of daily life, Fujitsu Ltd has begun offering an automatic English to Japanese and vice versa translation service on the Internet. The service uses Fujitsu’s Atlas machine translation system, which was originally developed to run on Fujitsu mainframes and now runs on the S (Sun Microsystems Inc) family of workstations Fujitsu buys OEM. Fujitsu subsidiary Fujitsu Learning Media will offer the service, which is free until May 12, after which it will be 0.65 cents per English word and 1.30 cents per Japanese character. The service can be accessed at http://trns.cab.infoweb.or.jp – a home page that is unfortunately only in Japanese right now although English is under development. At the same time, Sharp Corp has introduced a new color notebook computer, the Mebius PC- A400 series, featuring 12.1 or 11.3 SuperVGA-compatible thin-film transistor active-matrix display unit, 120MHz or 133MHz Pentium and a quad-speed CD-ROM drive. It also contains pre-loaded software for easy connection to the Internet and English-Japanese Translation Support software that translates the home page screen display into a simultaneously displayed Japanese language window. The machine also links to the Zaurus personal organizer, Japan’s answer to the Newton and HP 200LX.
