Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo, machine translation software developer Systran International and speech recognition and translation systems provider FueTrek have set up Mirai Translate, a joint venture that will develop and market machine translation technology and services. Docomo, Systran, FueTrek will recruit engineers. The joint venture will be established in October. Docomo will own a 51 percent stake in the JV, while Systran and FueTrek will hold a 30 percent and 19 percent stake, respectively. The JV will initially have 15 employess, and a capital of CNY 990 million.
The three partners plan to develop machine translation software capable of satisfying diverse needs, from the translation of business documents to conversation-level communication required by tourists. Headquartered in Tokyo, the joint venture will initially develop technologies to translate between Japanese and three other languages—English, Chinese and Korean—with future plans to translate between Japanese and other widely used Asian languages such as Vietnamese and Indonesian.
The joint venture will leverage multi-language translation engines developed by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and machine translation technology based on natural Japanese-language processing technology developed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT).
