This paper proposes a method of automatic transliteration from English to Japanese words. Our method successfully transliterates an English word not registered in any bilingual or pronunciation dictionaries by converting each partial letters in the English word into Japanese katakana characters. In such transliteration, identical letters occurring in different English words must often be converted into different katakana. To produce an adequate transliteration, the proposed method considers chunking of alphabetic letters of an English word into conversion units and considers English and Japanese context information simultaneously to calculate the plausibility of conversion. We have confirmed experimentally that the proposed method improves the conversion accuracy by 63% compared to a simple method that ignores the plausibility of chunking and contextual information.

This paper describes a Multi-language Translation Example Browser, a type of translation memory system. The system is able to retrieve translation examples from bilingual news databases, which consist of news transcripts of past broadcasts. We put a Japanese-English system to practical use and undertook trial operations of a system of eight language-pairs.