Fujitsu Ltd on Wednesday launched an automatic English-to- Japanese and Japanese-to-English translation service on the Internet, saying it can be accessed from anywhere in the world – which is rather the idea of the Internet, isn’t it. The service uses the Fujitsu Atlas high- performance machine translation system, with dictionaries in 22 fields, including business, medicine, electronics, computing, law and biology, and can be also customized with specific terms by the user. The service, available round the clock, translates one page of text (not one as densely written as Computergram) in 15 to 30 minutes, and Fujitsu plans to charge 0.65 of a cent per translated English character – so to do an issue of Computergram would cost about $400 – and 1.3 cents per translated Japanese character. It is offering a free trial of Atlas until May 12, at http://trns.cab.infoweb.or.jp.
