This paper describes a prototype Japanese-to-Chinese automatic language translation system. ALT-J/C (Automatic Language Translator - Japanese-to-Chinese) is a semantic transfer based system, which is based on ALT-J/E (a Japanese-to-English system), but written to cope with Unicode. It is also designed to cope with constructions specific to Chinese. This system has the potential to become a framework for multilingual translation systems.

ATR-MATRIX is a multi-lingual speech-to-speech translation system designed to facilitate communications between two parties of different languages engaged in a spontaneous conversation in a travel arrangement domain. In this paper, we propose a new evaluation method for speech translation systems. Our current focus is on measuring the robustness of a language translation sub-system, with quick calculation and low cost. Therefore, we calculate the difference between the translation output from transcription texts and the translation output from input speech by a dynamic programming method. We present the first trial experiment of this method applied to our Japanese-to-English speech translation system. We also provide related discussions on such points as error analysis and the relationship between the proposed method and translation quality evaluation manually done by humans.

Recently, several types of Japanese to English MT (machine translation) systems have been developed, but prior to using such systems, they have required a pre-editing process of re-writing the original text into Japanese that could be easily translated. For communication of translated information requiring speed in dissemination, application of these systems would necessarily pose problems. To overcome such problems, a Multi-Level Translation Method based on Constructive Process Theory had been proposed. In this paper, the benefits of this method in ALT-J/E will be described. In comparison with the conventional elementary composition method, the Multi-Level Translation Method, emphasizing the importance of the meaning contained in expression structures, has been ascertained to be capable of conducting translation according to meaning and context processing with comparative ease. We are now hopeful of realizing machine translation omitting the process of pre-editing.