Possibility of Utilizing Network Machine Translation Systems for Education of Foreign Students

This study examines the performance of Japanese-to-English machine translation systems in order to assess their potential for use in an Internet-based language support system for foreign students studying at Japanese universities. Foreign students often face the difficulty of reading and writing Japanese when studying or writing reports at night and off-campus. In such situations they do not have the support of friends or teachers to ensure the correctness of their language. Electronic mail is one means of communication that gives foreign students the opportunity to have language questions answered by friends or teachers. However, composing the email itself may also present difficulties, and communicating in the students ’ native language does not solve the problem. We address this situation by proposing an Internet-based machine translation system. The efficiency and accuracy of current machine translation systems is examined using a range of actual text examples, and the results are discussed in terms of a commercial machine translation systems operated on a personal computer as a simulation. While promising, the proposed system is considered to be only marginally applicable due to low performance offered by current machine translation systems