Report on machine translation market in Japan

MT Summit VII Sept. 1999 Report on Machine Translation Market in Japan Yoshiyuki Sakamoto Minoru Moriguchi Tsukuba Women’s University Sharp Corporation Chair of Market Research Committee1 Member of Market Research Committee Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation Japan Japan Abstract This paper reports the current situation of the machine translation (MT) market in Japan, based on a survey conducted through ques- tionnaires and interviews. The research tar- gets three groups: MT manufacturers (in- cluding 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. Ac- cording to the survey of manufacturers and vendors, shipments and sales of MT systems plunged during 1996 to 1998. but respon- dents 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 start- ed with the first interview on June 25. We plan to interview at least 20 people in the translation industry in four meetings. The re- sults 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. 1 Introduction We are living in the era of global networks in whi- ch information we need is very often written in lan- guage other than our native tongue. This situation has made machine translation indispensable to browsing the Internet. However, no one knows what is going on in the Japanese MT community, either on the manufacturer side or the user side. To clarify the real situation and to predict the future market, the Asia-Pacific Asso- ciation for Machine Translation (AAMT) has begun survey research through questionnaires and inter- views. The survey is mainly responsible for the Mar- ket Research Committee, and the later joint meeting of the Market Research Committee and Technical Research Committee. The research is divided into three parts: (1) ques- tionnaires to manufacturers. (2) interviews with pro- fessional translators, and (3) questionnaires to gener- al users. Question sheets vary among three groups. This paper shows the results of part 1 and the pro- gress of part 2. which will be completed by Septem- ber. We are also designing the questionnaire for part 3 with the cooperation of Mitsubishi Research Insti- tute. The following sections describe the details of parts 1 and 2. 2 Survey of MT Manufacturers We investigated shipments and sales of MT sys- tems, source and target languages that MT systems process, and platforms of MT systems by collecting questionnaires from manufacturers. To keep the raw data confidential, we asked an audit company to col- lect and count the data. The results were discussed in the joint meeting of the Market Research Committee and Technical Research Committee. 2.1 Methodology We sent the questionnaires to MT manufacturers and vendors December 1, 1998 and had collected them until the end of …

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