When conducting market research on machine translation, we research the volume of sales continuously in order to determine the scale of the machine translation market in Japan. We have officially announced these figures every year. Furthermore, since 2003, we administered questionnaires regarding the Web translation.

This paper reports the current situation of the machine translation (MT) market in Japan, based on a survey conducted through questionnaires and interviews. The research targets three groups: MT manufacturers (including sales agents), professional translators and translation agencies, and general users. We completed the questionnaire on the first group and are now querying the second group through interviews and questionnaires. According to the survey of manufacturers and vendors, shipments and sales of MT systems plunged during 1996 to 1998. but respondents are expecting a slight recovery in 1999 and 2000. The primary requirement to raise shipments and sales is improvement of translation quality, most respondents believe. The survey of translation professionals started with the first interview on June 25. We plan to interview at least 20 people in the translation industry in four meetings. The results will be orally reported at the conference site. We are also designing the questionnaire for general users, which we plan to finish by the end of this year.