The Japanese Ministry of International Trade & Industry is to sponsor a project to develop machine translation systems with four Asian countries, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand: initially it will involve only translation between Japanese and the other languages, but in the future, if there is a demand, systems may be developed to enable communication between the various Asian languages as well; the project has been budgeted at $45m over six years and the effort will involve the main Japanese manufacturers, who are already working with the MITI-backed Centre for International Co-operation for Computerisation, while technical assistance will be provided by the Electrotechnical Laboratory, which is already hard at work on machine translation systems for English-into-Japanese.
