The Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation (AAMT), formerly called the Japan Association for Machine Translation (created in 1991), is comprised of three entities: researchers, manufacturers, and users of machine translation systems. The association endeavors to develop machine translation technologies to expand the scope of effective global communications and, for this purpose, is engaged in machine translation system development, improvement, education, and publicity.
In Web embraces language translation, an article of ZDNN (ZD Network News) of
July 21, 1998, Martha L. Stone explains:
"Among the new products in the $10 billion language translation business are instant translators for websites, chat rooms, e-mail and corporate intranets.
The leading translation firms are mobilizing to seize the opportunities. Such as:
SYSTRAN has partnered with AltaVista and reports between 500,000 and 600,000 visitors a day on babelfish.altavista.digital.com, and about 1 million translations per day — ranging from recipes to complete Web pages.
About 15,000 sites link to babelfish, which can translate to and from French,
Italian, German, Spanish and Portuguese. The site plans to add Japanese soon.
'The popularity is simple. With the Internet, now there is a way to use US content. All of these contribute to this increasing demand,' said Dimitros Sabatakakis, group CEO of SYSTRAN, speaking from his Paris home.
Alis technology powers the Los Angeles Times' soon-to-be launched language translation feature on its site. Translations will be available in Spanish and French, and eventually, Japanese. At the click of a mouse, an entire web page can be translated into the desired language.
Globalink offers a variety of software and Web translation possibilities, including a free e-mail service and software to enable text in chat rooms to be translated.
But while these so-called 'machine' translations are gaining worldwide popularity, company execs admit they're not for every situation.