That Japanese-into-German machine translation system demonstrated by Fujitsu Ltd the other day (CI No 1,241), is based on Fujitsu’s four-year-old Japanese-to-English Atlas II system, which runs on Sun Microsystems workstations: the new version was developed in conjunction with Aris Software-Entwicklung GmbH, with the help of Professor Hanakata at Stuttgart University; the claimed speed of 6,000 words an hour is achieved with the thing running on a Sun-4/110 and includes a German dictionary of 50,000 entries and 12,000 grammatical rules; the Japanese-to-English version has sold 110 copies so far – but if you want to translate from English into Japanese, forget it – it’s one way only.
