Machine Translation in the Oriental world

The Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation was established on the 17th April 1991, under a different name, the Japan Association for Machine Translation. In order to widen its horizons, through the expansion of its operations, it changed its name to the current designation.

The translators association is comprised of three entities: “researchers, manufacturers and users of machine translation systems.” It is the organisation’s endeavour to develop the technologies of machine translation in order “to expand the scope of effective global communications”. For this to be accomplished, the Asian translation association is committed to developing machine translation systems and improving them. Moreover, The AAMT wishes to educate the people and publicise the use of this technology.

AAMT has 22 corporate members, including “machine translation (MT) system manufacturers, MT-related and tool developers, MT system distributors, MT research institutes, and other organisations”. Adding to the corporate members, there are over 50 individual associates, including “scholars, researchers, engineers, developers, distributors, document handlers, translation technicians and translators”.

Relationship with other organisations

The Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation treasures its relationship with fellow organisations across the globe. There is co-operation between the AAMT and several research-and-development organisations involved in machine translation. Examples of that are the “Information Processing Society of Japan, the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Natural Language Processing.” The Japan Electronic Industry Association also does research on technological systems MT-related.

The AAMT promotes in a comprehensive way the development of MT. Its operations include research and development, production, marketing and user services.

There are two types of membership available: corporate and individual.

The AAMT also publishes an exclusive journal for its members. It is written in Japanese.

AAMT Nagao Award

Makoto Nagao was the first president of the AAMT. After receiving the Japan Prize, he conferred part of his prize money to the assistance of AAMT’s work. With those funds, the association established the AAMT Nagao Award.

It is aimed at individuals or groups “who have contributed to research and development leading to or facilitating commercialization of machine translation systems”. It differs from academic awards, for it is awarded, for example, “for contributions to the commercialization of high performance machine translation systems” or “for the launch of new services utilizing machine translation systems”. However, the award doesn’t exclude “research results that also have academic significance”.

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