One of the most frequently asked questions from those who attend our seminars and conferences is,

- "Is it possible to introduce machine translation even for Japanese to English translation?"

- "Are there any cases where machine translation has been introduced for Japanese to English translation?"

This is a question.

More and more companies are requesting to have their internal technical documents and service manuals translated into English using machine translation (automatic translation) without incurring high costs and taking a long time.

However, when it comes to machine translation from Japanese to English,
there are still relatively few cases of implementation compared to European languages.
Many people seem to have doubts about whether machine translation is actually effective.

So, in this case, we would like to introduce a case where machine translation was introduced for Japanese-English translation.

 

● Introduction of Japanese-English Machine Translation for Support Content

The translation target for this case is "Japanese support content".

We received a request from a client who wanted to translate Japanese support content into English using machine translation without incurring costs or taking up time.

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Project Overview

Translated item: IT product support content
Language: Japanese to English
Volume: 10,000 to 20,000 characters per project
※Corpus available for use with regularly occurring statistical engines: None

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Actually, this customer had already introduced machine translation for "European languages" from English.
Therefore, when the same engine was used for Japanese-English translation, the quality was poor and it ended up costing more time and money, which was their experience.

At our company, we assisted in selecting an engine suitable for Japanese-English machine translation.
For this project, there was no existing data such as a translation memory to use as a corpus.
Therefore, we verified the quality using a rule-based engine and decided to use the engine with the best quality for the project.

In addition, regarding quality standards, we have decided to conduct post-editing at the level of "it is acceptable to be somewhat unnatural as long as the meaning is accurately conveyed" based on our customers' requests.

 

●Effect of Introducing Machine Translation

 

Use the best machine translation engine and
perform machine translation at a level where "it is acceptable even if it is slightly unnatural as long as the meaning is accurately conveyed"
resulted in machine translation.

Translation costs and time reduced by approximately 40%

We were able to achieve it.

From our customers,

・Previously, we struggled with implementing and it didn't go well.
Thanks to the smooth operation of Japanese-English machine translation, it was a great help.

・It was discovered that there is an optimal engine for each language.

・In the future, we would like to introduce machine translation to other content such as internal documents and instruction manuals, in addition to support content.

We were able to receive comments from
As in the case introduced this time, even with Japanese-English translation,
depending on the conditions and workflow,
it is fully possible to use machine translation to reduce costs and shorten translation periods.

However, in the case of "translation from English to European languages" and
"translation from Japanese to English", there are often different suitable machine translation engines, so
please be sure to choose the best engine.

Be sure to try machine translation verification with your current data.

・How much quality output can be produced?

・How much cost reduction and translation time reduction is possible?

・What do I need to prepare when introducing machine translation?

We recommend that you check these points.

At Human Science Co., Ltd., we also offer data verification for Japanese-English machine translation and provide suggestions for the best engine and workflow. Please feel free to contact us.

On 6/16, we will also hold a "Japanese-English Machine Translation Utilization Seminar" and introduce points for mastering machine translation (automatic translation) in Japanese-English translation. Please look forward to it!

 

>>Contact Form

If the form is not available, please send your inquiry via email to hsweb_inquiry@science.co.jp.

Alternatively, please feel free to contact us at TEL: 03-5321-3111 or by phone.

 

Blog Writing Team

Tokuda Ai

・As a machine translation consultant, I provide consulting services for Japanese companies on machine translation implementation and process building.
・I place importance on the quality of the source text, which affects multilingual translation, and also provide consulting services for manual creation suitable for machine translation in the Japanese writing process.
・I also give presentations on the following topics related to machine translation.
- Presentation at the 23rd JTF (Japan Translation Federation) Translation Festival in 2013
"Approaches to Machine Translation in Multilingual Environments
- From the Perspectives of Evaluation and Process"
- Presentation at the 2014 AAMT (Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation) Machine Translation Fair
"Mastering Machine Translation - Improving Quality and Productivity"