NEC Announces Real-time Chinese-Japanese Translation Program

NEC announced on Thursday the development of a real-time speech translation program to facilitate better communication between speakers of the Chinese and Japanese languages. The program will offer translation in both audio and text formats and will allow for different accents spoken across China.

The emphasis is on people on the move, NEC said in a statement. The software, which will work on mobile devices running Windows CE, contains a library of 36,000 Chinese and 50,000 Japanese words frequently used by travelers.

The program is reminiscent of another real-time translation program for PDAs, for English and Japanese, launched in 2002.

The company had no release date for the Chinese-Japanese translation program and stressed that the software was still in development.