ALTFLASH: a Japanese-to-English machine translation system for market flash reports.

We have developed a Japanese-to-English machine translation system for market flash reports called ALTFLASH. ALTFLASH is a hybrid translation system based on a combination of rule-based translation and template-based translation systems. The experimental results were that the system could achieve good translation for 90% of source sentences (70% of articles) in reports on the foreign section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. In addition, we focused on account settlement flashes, which formed fixed patterns, and developed a new system to translate them. This system has been installed, by Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei) in March 1998 in their English translation service for news flashes on settlements of accounts. It is a fully automatic translation system that enables news flashes to be broadcast to the world without requiring human intervention.