Japan wants to make real-time AI language translation a reality by 2025

As part of plans to make life easier for non-Nipponese speakers, Japan will offer ‘simultaneous translation’ from Japanese into numerous languages including English by 2025.

The project has been allocated ¥1.4bn – $13m – by the nation’s Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry in the country’s overall fiscal 2020 budget.

As part of its so-called the “Comprehensive Measures for Acceptance and Coexistence of Foreign Nationals,” the idea is to make real-time machine translation a reality for English, Chinese and Korean, as well as Portuguese and Mongolian, native speakers.

The public sector system will be used at local government offices and medical facilities used by for foreign residents, as well as at tourist facilities and hotels around the country. The plan is to mimic how human translators do their job by interpreting speech a few seconds after the speaker starts talking, effectively ‘predicting’ what will be coming next, based on linguistic structures and context.

If achieved, software that could translate more than a few simple phrases at a time into continuous speech would be a major landmark in AI capability, say experts.

Immigration to Japan has always been at a lower level than other advanced economies, partly due to a lack of cultural openness to the idea but also the fact that the language is so hard for outsiders to pick up.

However, with an ageing workforce, Japan’s leaders have recently changed legislation in order to attract more workers with defined special skills.

Hence the Ministry’s suggestion that Nepalese and Khmer may be included, as it’s envisaged that guest workers from these regions will be recruited as part of the plan.