A group of US, European and Japanese manufacturers are sponsoring the application of artificial intelligence techniques to the problem of simultaneous multi-language machine translation systems at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh: the key difference between the planned system and current ones will be that no prior editing of the Japanese will be required before translation, and multilingual capability will be achieved by translating all languages into a common intermediate language; IBM and Hewlett-Packard have already committed to the project, and Japanese manufacturers are set to follow, each participant being required to put up $150,000 for the project, which its backers hope will start to bear fruit in two or three years.
