Press Releases

TOKYO, JAPAN, September 29, 2014 --- NTT DOCOMO, INC., SYSTRAN INTERNATIONAL Co., Ltd. and FueTrek Co., Ltd. announced today a three-way agreement on September 29 to set up Mirai Translate, Inc., a joint venture to develop and market machine translation technology and services with the highest accuracy in the industry. DOCOMO, SYSTRAN INTERNATIONAL and FueTrek will recruit engineers. The joint venture will be established in October.

Together, the three companies' strengths will enable the development of highly accurate machine translation software capable of satisfying diverse needs, from the translation of business documents to conversation-level communication required by tourists. Leading up to the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, the number of foreign visitors to Japan, as well as the number of Japanese going overseas, is expected to increase dramatically. 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.

DOCOMO has a track record of providing top-tier translation services, including the Hanashite Hon'yaku automatic voice translation service. SYSTRAN is a world-leading translation software developer, while FueTrek has a proven track record of developing speech recognition and translation systems.

The joint venture aims to achieve the world's highest level of accuracy for machine translation, leveraging 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).