Background

The Internet population in Japan is rapidly increasing with over 47 million users as of end of 2000 according to the Information and Communications White Paper[1]. Of these, 37 million accessed the Internet via PCs on land lines and nearly 24 million accessed via mobile phones, PHS (Personal Handyphone System) or PDAs (the numbers duplicate for these three devices). The increase in users accessing the Internet from mobile phones and PHS is particularly noticeable, given that Internet access via these portable devices only became available in 1999.

According to the Telecommunications Carriers Association[2], the number of mobile phone subscribers grew from 58 million in January, 2001 to 67 million in January 2002. In particular, users of mobile phone-based IP services such as i-mode increased from around 29 million in January 2001 to over 30 million in February 2001 and reached around 49 million in January 2002. This growth rate of 69% far exceeded that of around 16% for the mobile phone subscriber population during the same one-year period. 73% of mobile phone subscriptions include IP connections. As of January 2002, the combined subscriber numbers for mobile phones and PHS are around 73 million.

MobileMT Services

MobileMT applications via portable terminals are primarily a server-based service. As stated in the March 2001 survey report[3] by the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association, Web-based translation services on the Internet had initially assumed a PC-based client. However, reflecting in part the increase in the mobile IP connection demand, services based on a mobile terminal as client started to appear since late 2000 to early 2001. Such services include "Impac [sic] Automatic Translation Service" by NEC, "Excite Mobile - Translation" by Excite and "J-Server Pocket" by Kodensha. With each of these services, the user can access MT via a mobile device (the actual translation process takes place on the server). The J-Server Pocket also incorporates a voice synthesis function and allows Japanese sentences to be translated into English and Korean and output in spoken form. In this way, this service takes advantage of the feature of mobile phones as a voice-based device.

MobileMT linked to MT proper

Impac Automatic Translation Service

This service was specifically designed to provide an MT service for contents relating to the exposition during the Internet Expo between December 31, 2000 and December 31, 2001. It allowed i-mode terminals to receive automatic translation services in Japanese and English. It also allowed PC-based services into nine languages: Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Russian.

Excite Mobile - Translation (http://mobile.excite.co.jp/k/tools/world/)

This is accessible from "Excite Mobile" - a service for mobile phones. It is available free of charge from i-mode, J-sky and EZweb phones. The "translation" appears as a menu item on the same level as categories such as "category search", "weather", "horoscope" and "stock market information". This service is a mobile version of the PC-based "Excite Translation" and allows translations between English and Japanese in either direction.

J-SERVER Pocket service (http://www.kodensha-s.co.jp/jserver/pc/jspocket.html)

This service allows Japanese inputs to be translated into English and Korean in spoken form. There are three speech synthesis engines to handle English, Korean and Japanese. It creates speech data in real time and reproduces speech by downloading it on the mobile device. The translation engines cover Japanese/English, English/Japanese and Japanese/Korean translation pairs. It uses a new technology which enables the translation results in Korean Hangul to be displayed in Japanese katakana-phonetic letters. It also has built-in conversation phrase books for English, Korean and Chinese (about 1000 phrases).

MobileMT without MT-proper functionality

In addition to the above mobileMTs, there is a range of services which provide similar functionality without using MT proper.

Mobilingual (http://koigakubo.hitachi.co.jp/mobilingual/)

In November 2000, Toshiba released a voice-based domain-specific (travel conversation) automatic translation system "Mobilingual". This service has around 1700 sentence examples corresponding to ten languages stored in the server. The user makes a phone call to the service center and requests a translation via speech and receives the equivalent sentence in a requested language in speech. The server carries out speech recognition, matching between the recognized sentences and the entries in the database, followed by speech synthesis.

Multilingual Conversation Mobile Service for i-mode (http://www.unikotech.com/iKombu1/)

Similarly, this service by Unikotech displays corresponding domain-specific (travel) sentences in Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean and Russian on i-mode phones. Although the results are not provided in spoken form, the translated sentence is accompanied by Japanese phonetic letters to show pronunciation.

My Tangocho [My Wordbook] (http://naragw.sharp.co.jp/softcenter/Power%20EJ/index.html)

This comes as an accessory to "Honyaku Kore Ippon 2002" by Sharp and allows the user to transmit word data from PC to a mobile phone. This service is unique in linking PCs and mobile phones, enabling users to access and learn English words any time anywhere.

MobileMT for Palm-sized PCs

In addition to the above services, although in the minority, mobileMT applications for palm-sized PCs are emerging. "Surasura Ryokokaiwa" [Fluent Travel Conversation] (http://www.unikotech.com/japan/product/j_product7.htm) by Unikotech work on Palm OS and PPC OS machines. It is search/referencing software with travel conversation phrases in Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean and Russian. Its PalmOS version allows inputs in Chinese (simplified), Korean and Russian while voice output capabilities are being developed for the PPC OS version.

At this stage, the mobilMT market for palm-sized PCs is smaller compared with that for the mobile phones and accordingly products for the former are limited. However, the PDA market (including handheld PCs) has been showing two-digit growth since 1998, with nearly 1.4 million units in 2000 according to " PDA Market Research Report" by Yano Economic Research Ltd4. This market is expected to grow with palm-sized PCs as the main product to reach the 3 million level in 2004 (for palm-sized PCs alone around 2.2 million) [4].

Future trends

The future MobileMT market will be influenced by how the mobile terminal market develops: it could consist of MT applications which incorporate differentiation features unique to palm-sized PCs or alternatively, applications with similar functionality as mobile phones but with a difference in operability by the combined use of PHS.

References

[1] Information and Communications White Paper by the Japanese Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications: http://www.soumu.go.jp/hakusyo/tsushin/index.html.

[2] "The number of subscribers for mobile phones, IP connection services (portable), PHS and radio pagers" by the Telecommunications Carriers Association: http://www.tca.or.jp/japan/daisu/index.html.

[3] "4.2 Web Translation Services on the Internet" (March, 2001) In Human Interface Technology Report by the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association (87-98).

[4] http://www.yano.co.jp/press/2001/010605.htm. (June 5, 2001)